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beyond wishful thinking 55

one that I propose to succeed them are not simply philosophies or

worldviews, as these conventional concepts have generally been used.

Th ey are not mere philosophies or worldviews, even when they make

no appeal to the idea of a transcending and redemptive God who re-

veals to mankind, through his prophets, the path of its salvation. Th e

will to take a stand in the commitment of existence in a par tic u lar di-

rection, despite the apparent absence of adequate grounds on which to

do so, and then to insist that the whole of individual life and social

experience be penetrated by the vision informing such a commitment,

sets religion apart.

According to these present, past, and future- oriented standards, to count
as religion a set of enacted beliefs or belief- informed practices must have
three characteristics.
A fi rst characteristic of religion is to respond to the incurable fl aws
in our existence: our movement toward death, our inability to place our
existence in a defi nitive context of understanding and meaning, and
the emptiness and insatiability of our desires, to which we are wrongly
tempted to add (wrongly because we can redress it) the disproportion
between the force of our circumstances and the reach of our nature.
Whether the response off ered by religion to these defects is one that robs
them of their sting or on the contrary acknowledges them unfl inchingly
remains an issue at stake in the unfi nished history of religion.
Th e beliefs that comprise a religion may represent a more or less oblique
answer to those terrors and suff erings. Th e answer, however, must never
be so indirect that it cannot be understood by the believer as respond-
ing to these suff erings and terrors in ways that engage the will as well as
the imagination.
However, religion has almost never cordoned these problems off
from the rest of experience and addressed them in isolation. A religious
vision has consequences for every aspect of existence: no part of indi-
vidual or social life is so prosaic or so technical, none so this- worldly or
unrefl ective, that it cannot be infl uenced and penetrated by a religious
orientation.
If in the midst of our ordinary aff airs we stop to think about the in-
tensity of life and the certainty of death, of life and death unexplained
in a universe whose ultimate contours, origin, and future we are unable