Walter Scott Stepanenko

In her approach to religious pluralism, Jeanine Diller has advocated for partialism, the view that multiple religious engagement is needed for knowledge of the Ultimate. In this article, I expound on partialism, which I interpret as a transreligious view that posits a noetic threshold for knowledge of the Ultimate. Given this interpretation, I argue that there are two central ambiguities that the partialist needs to clarify. First, the partialist needs to explain whether the noetic threshold should be understood in a metaconceptual or perspectival manner. Second, the partialist needs to explain whether a tradition’s noetic contributions are commensurable or incommensurable. I identify some of the advantages and disadvantages of each option, and I conclude with some future directions for partialist transreligious pluralism.

Contemporary religious epistemology is often divided into classical evidentialists, who work primarily in and through arguments, and their detractors, who often take perceptual or functional states to be immediately justifying. As a result, contemporary religious epistemology often overlooks the relationship between theory and practice and the rich historical traditions that integrate lived experience and intellectual assent. Recovering the genealogical link between 18th century Protestant pietism and the 19th century classical pragmatism of William James, Pietism and Pragmatism articulates a philosophical approach that brings questions of religion and spirituality back to practice while contributing to traditional and perennial philosophical discussions. Applying this approach to the philosophical space between the traditional Christianity and perfect being theism of the Protestant pietists and the pluralism and alternative theism of Jamesian pragmatism, Pietism and Pragmatism offers a defense of the continued relevance of spirituality and religion and a fresh exposition of the boundaries of philosophy of religion.

In his innovative and creative attempt to reconcile empiricism and religion, William James made the case for finite theism and a pluralistic conception of the cosmos involving overlapping minds of several scales. In doing so, James also cautioned against abandoning functional psychology in favor of what he called entitative points of view. In his work, Ralph Barton Perry critiqued James for understating the role of embodiment in cognition. In Perry’s view, the central role the body plays in cognition suggests that so-called social or composite minds lack integration and are thus cognitively inferior to embodied minds. However, Perry also believed that the emergent character of embodied cognition provides grounds for an alternative, humanistic spirituality. In this article, I compare James and Perry on theology, and I argue that Perry’s concerns about the importance of embodiment in cognitive integration help illuminate a tripartite distinction between what I call impersonal, subpersonal, and personal theologies that scholars looking for more embodied approaches to theology would do well to consider.

One of the most popular preachers of his time, George Whitefield is less remembered today than his contemporaries Jonathan Edwards and John Wesley. While the latter’s commitment to experimental religion has been well documented, Whitefield’s understanding of the notion has not. In this article, I examine Whitefield’s use of the concept of experimental knowledge, and I trace how this concept mediates other distinctives of Whitefield’s Calvinist Methodism. I argue that while Whitefield shares a partial understanding of experimental religion with Wesley, Whitefield nonetheless espouses a distinctive view tailored to his Calvinism.

Few contemporary Christian philosophers can be identified as philosophical pragmatists, and yet, in this article, I argue that there is an often overlooked, but venerable tradition of pragmatism in Christian history. To make this case, I introduce and explain pragmatism as developed by William James. I argue that many of James’s central commitments can be found in the practical theology of John Wesley, and I contend that a comparison of James and Wesley supports the construction of a taxonomy of Christian pragmatism that not only proves the viability of the view but helps pose some important questions about the very nature of Christian philosophy.

Wesleyan moral theology is often approached teleologically, as a form of either virtue ethics or natural law ethics, and this approach is often motivated by an interpretation of John Wesley’s writings. In this paper, I critically examine this consensus. I argue that Wesley’s writings underdetermine the shape of Wesleyan moral theology because Wesley’s own views are equally consistent with recent developments in the neighborhood of divine command theory. I contend that a crucial case test for Wesleyan moral theology comes in John Wesley’s rejection of supererogation, a rejection which places him at odds with much of the natural law tradition and raises some questions for virtue ethical expositions of his moral theology. I close with the suggestion that perhaps the more important question is not how to interpret John Wesley, but how the contemporary Wesleyan should think about supererogation and what implications this might have for the shape of Wesleyan moral theology.

A missionary religious tradition such as Christianity is distinguished from some other traditions by a commitment to the goal of converting others. However, the very nature of this goal and the norms that govern the successful realization of this goal are not often explored. In this article, I argue that evangelization can be undertaken for several distinct reasons, including epistemic reasons, particularly in cases in which evangelizers are aiming at the multivalent goal of fellowship. I argue that this account illuminates several possible models of mission, that it can provide resources for further evaluation and modeling of evangelical efforts, and that it might signify the need for theologically informed positions in the contemporary meta-epistemological debate about epistemic reasons.

On more than one occasion, John Wesley found himself engaged in debate with Calvinists in the Methodist revival. In this article, I philosophically re-examine John Wesley’s concerns with the Calvinism of some members of his evangelical cohort. I argue that Wesley’s concerns fall into two types: theoretical concerns about the conceptual coherency of a view that makes God the author of sin and practical concerns about the moral implications of a view that suggests some individuals are elect and others are reprobate. I then attempt a principled reconstruction of these objections. I argue that while there is a rational Arminian case to be made here, what is arguably most valuable in this case is the distinctive method of weaving together thought and action in the Christian life the connections between Wesley’s theoretical and practical concerns reveal.

Epistemologists of religion disagree about what evidential value religious experiences have. Some argue that religious experiences have no evidential value while others argue that religious experiences constitute proof of God’s existence. This book argues that religious experiences can contribute to justificatory cases for belief in God in several distinct ways and that several justificatory cases are philosophically viable. This book contends that this joint justificatory viability is best explained by the diversity and development of religious lives: as religious believers grow in a faith tradition, their access to an evidential base can develop and the contributory work religious experiences provide in defense of religious belief can change. This suggests that various epistemologies of religious experience implicitly emphasize different life stages or different prototypical religious believers and that a fully adequate epistemology of religious experience will be expansive, pluralistic, and responsive to the diversity of religious believers and their development in a religious tradition.

Many central creedal statements in Christianity presuppose the existence of a substantial self, even though Christian tradition has not always explicitly used this terminology. However, in contemporary philosophy, the traditional Christian view has been charged with empirical inadequacy, an objection often motivated by neuroscientific considerations. In this paper, I examine the empirical adequacy of the traditional Christian view from a phenomenological perspective and from emerging contemporary cognitive scientific perspectives that downplay or de-emphasize the brain’s role in cognition. I argue that neither perspective supports fatal objections to the traditional view and I explain how the traditional Christian view of the self can be synthesized with some novel philosophical developments that suggest the continued relevance of the view.

Recent work in the cognitive science of religion has challenged some of the explanatory assumptions of previous research in the field. Nonetheless, some of the practitioners of the new cognitive science of religion theorize in the same skeptical spirit as their predecessors and either imply or explicitly claim that their projects undermine the warrant of religious beliefs. In this article, I argue that these theories do no additional argumentative work when compared to previous attempts to debunk religious belief and that these recent debunking efforts are very much motivated by methodological commitments that are shared with canonical research. I contend that these argumentative strategies put debunkers very much on an epistemic par with religious apologists: both advocate responses to the cognitive science of religion that are primarily motivated by methodological commitments.

The global COVID-19 pandemic has spotlighted several instances of churches violating state issued and scientifically recommended guidelines designed to keep populations healthy and to prevent the further spread of the disease. While these instances are minority responses to these orders, they nonetheless raise questions about the rationality of ecclesial belonging in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In this article, I draw on the work of William James and W. E. B. Du Bois to articulate a conception of ecclesial belonging as a social epistemological process engaging a complex, fluid multiplicity of knowers of various scales. I argue that, in this view, ecclesial rationality involves the construction of a concatenation of internal and external practices individual believers and groups can traverse so long as they consistently satisfy a plurality of desiderata. I suggest that what is irrational about religious-based defiance of COVID-19 guidelines is the church-sanctioned severance of internal from external practices. I suggest that this behavior is supported by a failure to grasp the demands of ecclesial rationality rather than embrace them, and that this conception of rationality may have been eroded by the value-neutral skepticism of secular rationality.

In Religious Experience, Wayne Proudfoot argued that a tout court rejection of reductionism in accounts of religious experience was not viable. According to Proudfoot, it’s possible to distinguish between an illegitimate practice of descriptive reductionism and the legitimate practice of explanatory reductionism. The failure to distinguish between these two forms of reductionism resulted in a protective strategy, or an attempt to protect religious experience from the reach of scientific explanation. Among the theorists whom he accused of deploying this illegitimate strategy Proudfoot included William James and his work in The Varieties of Religious Experience. In this article, I argue that while James does occasionally deploy a protective strategy in Varieties, this is not the only nor most important method of treating religious experience James developed. Implicit in his rejection of medical materialism, James not only deploys the protective strategy Proudfoot criticizes, but the pragmatic method with which he treats all claims. I argue that James’s pragmatic method leads to what James called noetic pluralism, or the view that there is no privileged knowledge practice, but a plurality of knowledge practices, and that this method puts pressure on the explanatory reductionist, who is implicitly committed to noetic monism.

When William James published Pragmatism, he gave it a subtitle: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. In this article, I argue that pragmatism is an epistemological method for articulating success in, and between, a plurality of practices, and that this articulation helped James develop radical empiricism. I contend that this pluralistic philosophical methodology is evident in James’s approach to philosophy of religion, and that this method is also exemplified in the work of one of James’s most famous students, W.E.B. Du Bois, specifically in the closing chapter of The Souls of Black Folk, “Of the Sorrow Songs.” I argue that “Sorrow Songs” can be read as an epistemological text, and that once one identifies the epistemic standards of pragmatism and radical empiricism in the text, it’s possible to identify an implicit case for moderate fideism in “Sorrow Songs.” I contend that this case illuminates the pluralistic philosophical methodology James worked throughout his career to develop, and that the James-Du Bois approach to philosophy may even help locate the epistemic value of other religious practices, beyond the singing of hymns, and identify terrain mainstream philosophy has long neglected.

William James advocated a form of finite theism, motivated by epistemological and moral concerns with scholastic theism and pantheism. In this article, I elaborate James’s case for finite theism and his strategy for dealing with these concerns, which I dub the problems of suffering. I contend that James is at the very least implicitly aware that the problem of suffering is not so much one generic problem but a family of related problems. I argue that one of James’s great contributions to philosophical theism is his advocacy for the view that adequate theistic philosophizing is not so much about cracking this family of problems, but finding a version of the problem to embrace.

Political theorists advocating the abolition of instrumental uses of groups of animals are divided with respect to how they evaluate welfare reforms. Radical abolitionists maintain that welfare reforms are only dubiously described as moral improvements while pragmatic abolitionists maintain that welfare reforms are moral improvements, even if the conditions they permit are unjust. This article examines Wyckoff’s interest model against the case of a Cincinnati coalition’s efforts to reform the local food chain. This article argues that the coalition’s program of choice is a welfare reform and that the interest model must evaluate the program as a moral improvement. This article concludes that if the interest model is the most appropriate political theory of animal rights, pragmatic abolitionism is philosophically more appropriate than radical abolitionism.