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Articles
Can Mythology Save the Miraculous?
Stephen Anderson argues that religion isn’t simply a system of profound myths – it relies on making factual claims which are really true.
Is religion a suitable subject for philosophy? For a great while now, the general answer in the academy has seemed to be “No.” After Darwin, Marx and Freud, after Nietzsche, Camus and Derrida, what possible vestige of legitimate space could be left to religion? Perhaps it might be conceded a niche among historical curiosities like alchemy and phrenology, but beyond the antiquarian realm, it was hard for a while to see where religion might belong.
Recently, however, religion has received a new lease on its academic life. Partly, this is because of the decline of modern confidence in the Enlightenment project, and it’s partly because of the emergence of new hermeneutics – in other words, new ways of interpreting religious texts. Postmodernism has generated a revived interest in narratives of all kinds, both true and fictional.
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