Introduction
2
In our global times there is a sense about deep flaws in religious heritages and also in the core of modern Western civilization. Modernity and its beliefs Changing the Debate
about freedom, human equality, science, and democracy are challenged. There seems to be little confidence that inherited cultural values and prac-tices can support a livable global future. Those who sense these problems in our civilization usually adopt one of three outlooks that are treated through-
out this book. They have set the terms of the current debate about religion and the human future.and the hatred of finite life. They embrace scientistic or naturalistic values in Secular humanists see in religion nothing but tyranny, ignorance, violence,
order to escape the excesses of religion. religion. Around the world people are reclaiming established religious authorities and the belief that religion offers redemption from the world. Humanistic values of freedom, reasonableness, tolerance, and human dignity True believers return to inherited
are judged to be vacuous, mere remnants of the failed modern project, or, worse, the veiled rhetoric of secular cultural imperialism. Finally, people who are ambiguity of the situation in which ultimate religious values are both open but uncommitted fall between the extremes. They bemoan the
collapsing and proliferating, and they await the future with alternating impulses of anxiety and hope, apathy and interest. They would like to commit themselves to a vision of a future worth living, but they are wary of both secular humanism and traditional religion. The question of religion and its
place in the human future is debated among those who demand conformity to the divine will, those who march under the banner of the creative assertion of human power, and still other people who anxiously wait for some cause for commitment.
that sustain a humane future? This book makes a case for theological human-ism beyond well-known frameworks. In order to do so, we reclaim the insights and principles of legacies that sustain social existence, advance a Can we learn to inhabit religious and non-religious visions of life in ways
genuinely religious and yet humanistic outlook, and meet challenges that arise on the global scene. Of course, the very notion of theological humanism will seem implausible for many. Does not humanism deny in principle a theological outlook? How can a theological orientation in life be defined as
humanistic? Is it not the case that both theological and humanistic outlooks are naïve and dangerous in a time when religion and human power endanger