Towards the end of Way to Wisdom, after noting how specialization has fragmented modern thought, Karl Jaspers writes that

One might wish for a philosophy that would encompass and assimilate the whole tradition, that would be equal to the intellectual situation of our time, that would express the contents common to all of us, and this both in sublime intellectual constructions and in simple propositions capable of finding resonance in every man.

Philosophers often distinguish in some way between two (or more) senses of life's meaning. Paul Edwards terms these a ‘cosmic’ and ‘terrestrial’ sense. The cosmic sense is that of an overall purpose of which our lives are a part and in terms of which our lives must be understood and our purposes and interests arranged. This overall purpose is often identified with God's divine scheme, but the two need not necessarily be equated. The terrestrial sense of meaning is the meaning people find (subjectively) in their own lives apart from the place of their lives in any ultimate end or context.

The purpose of this article is to develop a solution to the problem of evil within the context of a ‘revisionist' concept of God. The traditional approach to the problem of evil has been to assume one particular model of God, and then to ascertain how evil can be reconciled with that model. I hope to demonstrate that this is a mistake. What needs to be done, rather, is to acknowledge the existence of evil, and to ask whether this problem is generated by a faulty model of God. What I shall contend is that it is the traditional concept of God which generates this area of philosophical and theological perplexity, not the nature and function of evil. In particular, I shall attempt to show that the problem admits of a much more acceptable solution if the Christian believer abandons the notion of God as ‘a person’ or a disembodied agent, and conceives of God in a less overtly ‘personalistic’ manner.

In First Principles, Spencer attempted to construct a metaphysical system which synthesized all available knowledge into a single world-view. One major aspect of his task was to integrate Religion and Science. However, there is no single metaphysical system or structure unifying Spencer's thought, and my aim in this article is to identify the various different models of reality which he confuses. Spencer inherited these different, over-arching conceptions from his own European philosophical tradition, and with them came certain inherent metaphysical problems which he wished to solve.

How is Christian theology, as the self-understanding of the Christian life, to understand the world religions? How is it to understand them in relation to itself? In recent years Professor John Hick has proposed a pluralist paradigm of the world religions which would, if acceptable, answer these sort of questions. In this article we are going to consider the acceptability of Hick's paradigm to Christian theology. The question we want to put to it is simple: Will it do as a model for how Christian theology may begin to think its relation to the world religions?

Our discussion is in three parts. In the first part we present Hick's paradigm in, what we take to be, it's strongest form, defending it against certain criticisms. In the second part we consider its phenomenological foundations and the possibility of its judicious evaluation. Finally, in the third part, we offer a critique and come to a conclusion about it's acceptability to Christian theology. However, our answer is only a small contribution to a much larger task: ‘the theological understanding of non-Christian religions’.

During June, 1836 Soren Kierkegaard attended a soiree in Copenhagen where the wine flowed, witty conversation bubbled from every corner, and he himself was at the centre of merriment – sparkling, acerbic, enormously witty. After the party he returned home and penned the following lines in his journal:

I have just now come from a party where I was its life and soul; witticisms streamed from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me, but I went away – yes, the dash would be as long as the radius of the earth's orbit…and wanted to shoot myself.

Navajo religious rituals are so multifaceted that one has trouble perceiving any centre of gravity. The inevitable question is: What are the sources of unity behind the diversity of the chant system? Let us see what evidence there is among the Navajo that all religions tend to seek some point of contact with the divine.

In a 1953 paper H. H Price described a possible set of afterlife conditions for a disembodied self or consciousness. His model has remained something of a benchmark for dualist philosophers up to the present day. The purpose of this article is to begin with Price and, noting certain major weaknesses in his position, put forward an alternative view which is both more consistent and more theistic.

According to Anselm, all Divine qualities are tightly interrelated: they are implied by the unique central property of being absolutely perfect. In the second chapter of the Proslogium, Anselm claims that it is the essence of our concept of God that He is a being greater than which nothing can be conceived. From this, he argues, it is possible to infer that He is eternal, omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, and so on. In other words, given an absolutely perfect being we can derive all the attributes commonly ascribed to Him.

The Free Will Defence has been attacked as being unsound, implausible and, more recently, irrelevant. The first section of the paper returns to a discussion on the relevance of the Free Will Defence, arguing that the case for its irrelevance is inextricably impaled on the horns of a dilemma. In the second section it is shown that Free Will Theodicy, even in a form extended to include natural evil, need not be as implausible as it is sometimes portrayed for it demands no more than that good, on the whole, outweighs evil, on the whole. Finally, some tempting objections to the strategy employed in this argument are considered and rejected, both on the grounds that they are untenable in themselves and on the paradoxical ground that, if valid, the objections would appear to rule out any creation.