Pragmatism mediates rival extremes, and religion is no exception: The problems of realism versus antirealism, evidentialism versus fideism, and science versus religion, along with other key issues in the philosophy of religion, receive new interpretations when examined from a pragmatist point of view. Religion is then understood as a human practice with certain inherent aims and goals, responding to specific human needs and interests, serving certain important human values, and seeking to resolve problematic situations that naturally arise from our practices themselves, especially our need to live with our vulnerability, finitude, guilt, and mortality.

The book is a study of pragmatism and pragmatic pluralism in the philosophy of religion. Through critical examinations of James's, Dewey's, and recent neopragmatists' ideas, it argues that key issues in the field--including the debate between evidentialism and fideism, and the problem of evil--need rearticulation from a pragmatic pluralistic perspective.

This book responds to the currently unclear situation in the philosophy of religion by developing a version of pragmatic pluralism. This position is developed through a critical articulation and defense of pragmatist philosophy of religion, largely based on William James's and John Dewey's ideas. The historical background of pragmatism in Kantian transcendental philosophy as well as more recent neopragmatist developments in the philosophy of religion (e.g., Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam) are also taken into account.

This book responds to the currently unclear situation in the philosophy of religion by developing a version of pragmatic pluralism. This position is developed through a critical articulation and defense of pragmatist philosophy of religion, largely based on William James's and John Dewey's ideas. The historical background of pragmatism in Kantian transcendental philosophy as well as more recent neopragmatist developments in the philosophy of religion (e.g., Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam) are also taken into account.

Pragmatic Theology argues for a vision of religious life that is derived from the tradition of American pragmatism (James, Dewey, Royce); empirical theology (Chicago School, D.C. Macintosh, H. Richard Niebuhr); and American philosophy of religion (Stone, Frankenberry, Corrington). The author argues that there is a divine reality in human experience that when encountered gives meaning and value to a person's need for cultural fulfillment and to his or her religious need for self-transcendence. The book commends the openness of nature, the world, and human experience to creative transformation and growth. It supports the increase of human capacities to create morally livable and fulfilling communities, the enhancement of the free play of interpretation, and a social order where democratic utopian expectations are envisioned and actualized.

In Pragmatic Philosophy of Religion: Melioristic Case Studies, Ulf Zackariasson argues for the fruitfulness of pragmatic philosophy of religion by bringing it to bear on a number of classical topics within the contemporary philosophy of religion. Zackariasson first outlines a version of pragmatic philosophy of religion that takes the pragmatic insistence on the primacy of practice to heart. Here, he shows that religious traditions and their secular counterparts transmit a number of paradigmatic responses that adherents can draw on in their encounters with human life’s existential contingencies. He further discusses the upshot of this approach for how we think of miracles, religious diversity, and what it is to be religiously mistaken. In each case, Zackariasson shows that a pragmatic approach offers important novel perspectives and insights that contemporary (primarily analytic) philosophy of religion tends to neglect. By relating to debates and well-known positions within the contemporary philosophy of religion, he also makes these novel perspectives and insights concrete for those who are not already committed pragmatists. The case studies thus serve as invitations to constructive dialogue within an increasingly pluralistic philosophy of religion.

It is commonly believed that populist politics and social media pose a serious threat to our concept of truth. Philosophical pragmatists, who are typically thought to regard truth as merely that which is 'helpful' for us to believe, are sometimes blamed for providing the theoretical basis for the phenomenon of 'post-truth'. In this book, Sami Pihlström develops a pragmatist account of truth and truth-seeking based on the ideas of William James, and defends a thoroughly pragmatist view of humanism which gives space for a sincere search for truth. By elaborating on James's pragmatism and the 'will to believe' strategy in the philosophy of religion, Pihlström argues for a Kantian-inspired transcendental articulation of pragmatism that recognizes irreducible normativity as a constitutive feature of our practices of pursuing the truth. James himself thereby emerges as a deeply Kantian thinker.

Religious statements can be true or false, and are not merely arbitrary or personally meaningful. That is the core thesis of this work in pragmatist philosophy of religion. Other contemporary approaches are deficient, as they have problematic ways of understanding truth and experience. The argument in this study draws on Hilary Putnam's work in such fields as ethics, epistemology, philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. Influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein, however, Putnam doesn't fully acknowledge how religious statements, similar to other statements, depend on an interaction of our language and the world. This would make religious truth a matter of convention. Drawing on another source of inspiration for Putnam, William James, Niek Brunsveld shows how religious claims can have truth value.

In God the Created, Benjamin Chicka develops a method of inquiry and program for theology that he labels "pragmatic constructive realism." While influenced most heavily by American pragmatism, especially that of Charles S. Peirce, Chicka’s method draws upon a variety of sources, ranging from Plato to Karl Popper, Paul Tillich, and the field of biosemiotics. Chicka presents pragmatic constructive realism as a means of moving past binary debates between realism and antirealism in both philosophy and theology, and its fruitfulness is displayed by examining the philosophical theologies of John Cobb and Robert Cummings Neville. The result of that engagement is a novel hypothesis about God that embraces legitimate criticisms of both process theology (Cobb) and ground-of-being theology (Neville) while integrating insights from both ways of thinking. God's transcendence and immanence, indeterminacy and determinacy are fully affirmed. The entire argument serves as an example of why a fallible and pluralistic form of theology, one that embraces and learns from difference instead of trying to eliminate it, is important for the future of theology.

While moral philosophy has traditionally been understood as an examination of the good life, this book argues that ethical inquiry should, rather, begin from an examination of evil and other 'negative' moral concepts, such as guilt and suffering.