‘New Possibilities for Life and Thought’ →

A bunch of really intelligent people in the UK want to make religious philosophy more relevant by comparing faith communities and religious research. Steven Shakespeare, a member of the steering committee for the new Philosophy and Religious Practices network, explains what this sort of dialogue could look like:

My interest, then, is in how, in the encounter between philosophy and lived religion, we aren’t just seeing how two well-defined fields can link up (or not). We’re intervening, mutating the way each field is understood, hopefully in a more self-critical, more attentive way. This will involve being aware of imposing Christian (or Christianised secular) universal ideas of religion on actual practices, whilst also avoiding any romanticisation of the religious other as ‘exotic’ and beyond critique.

The intended outcome:

My hope is that the result will be new possibilities for life and thought which break down the tired divisions between practice and theory.