Renewing Our Understanding of Religion: Philosophy of Religion and the Goals of the Spiritual Life

In this paper, I consider how a renewed understanding of religion can contribute to a renewal in the philosophy of religion. In making this case, I seek to retrieve an older conception of religion, which has receded from view in recent discussion. On this conception, religious commitment is not fundamentally a matter of belief, from which various practices then flow, nor fundamentally a matter of practice, from which various creedal commitments then flow, but instead an amalgam of belief and practice, of the kind that is required for the pursuit of distinctively spiritual goods. A philosophy of religion that is rooted in this conception of religion, I argue, can deepen our appreciation of religion’s role in the wider economy of human life, and help us to identify new varieties of spiritual good, so contributing, potentially, to the development of new forms of religious and spiritual practice.