The powerful ascent of fundamentalist religions in the last forty years has chastened those who predicted a triumph of secular thought and the gradual withering away of all religions. Yet the prominence of hate-filled orthodoxies has also provoked a strong movement of spiritual progressives in every religious community who are seeking to reclaim the ethical foundations of their religion and sometimes to rethink the metaphysical and theological foundations that underlie them.
The challenge to religion is put forcefully by Philip Kitcher, whose subtitle, The Case for Secular Humanism, suggests a more powerful argument than the “New Atheists” have been able to supply, in part because it eschews their crude caricatures of the more sophisticated versions of contemporary religions. Kitcher hopes for a supersession of the privileged scriptures of religion to “a more inclusive collection of resources … supplied by the natural and social sciences … [and] derived from the...
