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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Submitting to Freedom: The Religious Vision of William James

Submitting to Freedom: The Religious Vision of William James

Ramsey, Bennett

Hardcover

Series: Religion in America

Philosophy19th Century United States HistoryGeneral Christianity

ISBN10: 0195074262
ISBN13: 9780195074260
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: Jan 14 1993
Pages: 192
Weight: 0.85
Height: 0.56 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
Ramsey presents a new analysis and interpretation of the religious views of the nineteenth-century American philosopher William James. He argues that James was primarily motivated by religious concerns in his writings and that this fact has been obscured by the artificial scholarly division of his philosophy, psychology, and religion--a symptom of the professionalization which James himself strenuously resisted in his own time. Ramsey believes that James is best understood in his historical context, as a representative of a society and culture struggling to come to terms with modernity. Much of James's religious work is a direct reflection of what has been called the spiritual crisis of the Gilded Age, a crisis which Ramsey examines in illuminating detail. James's religious vision, in Ramsey's view, hinges on the recognition and acceptance of contingency--the knowledge that we are at the mercy of change and chance. With so little else to rely on, James believed, people must learn to submit freely and responsibly into one another's care. Ramsey reintroduces James's thought into the contemporary discussion, and puts forward the kind of religious alternative that James was pointing to in his work: not worship, but acquiescence in a world of mutual relations; not obedience to authority, but conversion to the freedom of responsibility.

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