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“Do Religious Naturalists Really Believe in God?” H-Announce “Do Religious Naturalists Really Believe in God?” Announcement published by Daniel G. Cedarbaum on Wednesday, August 26, 2020 Type: Conference Date: September 13, 2020 to September 14, 2020 Subject Fields: Jewish History / Studies, Philosophy, Religious Studies and Theology “Do Religious Naturalists Really Believe in God?”Exploring some fundamental issues at the intersection of theology and philosophy. Sunday, September 13 and Monday, September 14, 2020 10:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. EDT and 1:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EDT each day (with morning and afternoon breaks) Using the Zoom platform The Mordecai M. Kaplan Center for Jewish Peoplehood, Bet Am Shalom Synagogue, and Temple Israel Center are delighted to invite you to attend a conference titled “Do Religious Naturalists Really Believe In God? Exploring some fundamental issues at the intersection of theology and philosophy.” The conference is intended to appeal both to professionals in the field and to interested non-professionals. Dr. Jerome A. Stone has written that naturalism “involves the assertion that there seems to be no ontologically distinct and superior realm … to ground, explain, or give meaning to this world. On the positive side it affirms that attention should be focused on the events and processes of this world to provide what degree of explanation and meaning are possible to this life. … There are some happenings or processes in our experience which elicit responses which can appropriately be called religious. These experiences and responses are similar enough to those nurtured by the paradigm cases of religion that they may be called religious without stretching the word beyond recognition.” We will try to answer the following questions: What are the possible Citation: Daniel G. Cedarbaum. “Do Religious Naturalists Really Believe in God?”. H-Announce. 08-26-2020. https://networks.h-net.org/node/73374/announcements/6361803/%E2%80%9Cdo-religious-naturalists-really-believe-god%E2%80%9D Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Announce meanings of “faith,” “mystery,” and “transcendence” in the absence of belief in a supernatural God? Are at least some varieties of religious naturalism a form of paganism and hence anathema to non-mystical Rabbinic Judaism? What is the relationship of Pragmatism in philosophy, particularly in the thought and writings of William James and John Dewey, to religious naturalism? Does accepting absolute epistemic constraints (limitations on our ability to know or discover “the truth”) necessarily preclude metaphysical speculation? This two-day conference will bring together a wonderful group of scholars, listed below (in alphabetical order), with the tentative titles of their presentations: Ari Ackerman – “Kaplan and Heschel on Religious Experience” Nadav S. Berman – “Some Remarks on Pantheism, Gnosticism, and the Challenges of Religious Naturalism” Emily Filler – “The God of Liberal Democracy: Mordecai Kaplan’s Pragmatic Theopolitics” Sanford Goldberg – “The Varieties of Religious Naturalism” Arthur Green –“A Neo-Hasidic Theology: Taking Jewish Monism Out of the Closet” Bar Guzi – “The Nonreductive Naturalism of Hans Jonas” Michael Hogue – “Henry Nelson Wieman and American Religious Naturalism” William Plevan –“Epistemology or Poetics?: Martin Buber and Neil Gillman on Myth” Rachel Sabath Beit-Halachmi –“Religious Naturalism in the Reform Movement” Mel Scult –“Kaplan’s Concept of Salvation – A Philosophy and Theology of Need” Gordon Tucker – “Kaplan, Spinoza, and the Sources of Truth” Kari Tuling – “Divergence or Convergence? Reading David Hartman in the Context of Mordecai Kaplan” Ellen Umansky – “Naturalism in Jewish Feminist Theology: Reimagining Citation: Daniel G. Cedarbaum. “Do Religious Naturalists Really Believe in God?”. H-Announce. 08-26-2020. https://networks.h-net.org/node/73374/announcements/6361803/%E2%80%9Cdo-religious-naturalists-really-believe-god%E2%80%9D Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-Announce Awe and Transcendence”. Contact Info: Dan Cedarbaum, by e-mail or at 847-492-5200. Dan is the Executive Director of The Mordecai M. Kaplan Center for Jewish Peoplehood (www.kaplancenter.org), which is the primary sponsor of this conference. Contact Email: [email protected] URL: https://kaplancenter.org/naturalism/ Citation: Daniel G. Cedarbaum. “Do Religious Naturalists Really Believe in God?”. H-Announce. 08-26-2020. https://networks.h-net.org/node/73374/announcements/6361803/%E2%80%9Cdo-religious-naturalists-really-believe-god%E2%80%9D Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 3.
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