On the goods of the religious life: contextualising the approach of Richard Swinburne

In this paper, I seek to extend Richard Swinburne’s discussion of the practical reasonableness of the religious way of life, by locating his account of the goods of that life within a larger context. Drawing on Thomas Aquinas’s category of infused moral virtue, I sketch an account of the motivational lure of the religious life which supplements Swinburne’s emphasis on the fulfilment of moral obligation, by considering the significance of, for example, distinctively theological aesthetic goods.