This article presents Yeshayahu Leibowitz's conception of Judaism and characterizes his position as typically religious-existentialist. It confronts Leibowitz's conception with Kantian ethics, refutes the analogy made between these two conceptions, and shows that Leibowitz's response to Kant is analogous to that of Kierkegaard, the Christian existentialist thinker. It considers Leibowitz's religious position a Jewish variation of Kierkegaard's notion of faith in the absurd. Such an analogy enables us not only to elucidate Leibowitz's religious conception but also to evaluate the implications of Kierkegaard's religious thought in a broader context.

This article argues that a sense of nature's mystery can inspire and inform ways of experiencing and engaging with natural places and creatures in a way that is deeply morally transformative. Focusing on Daoism, it argues that engagement with natural places and creatures can facilitate the cultivation of receptivity to a sense of nature's mystery in a way that gradually releases a person from stances and conceptions that are morally and ecologically objectionable. The article closes by suggesting that a capacity to cultivate receptivity to nature's mystery is contingent upon the concerns and convictions of our background moral and social culture.

What happens when you assume that the world is a dream in the mind of God, or that the world's history is a story that God is spinning? Focusing on the role that this assumption plays in the thought of Rabbi Mordechai Yosef Leiner (1801–1854), at least as it is understood by Rabbi Herzl Hefter, I argue that this assumption generates interesting solutions to old riddles in the philosophy of religion and interesting insights into the nature of religious language.

Among philosophers and theologians today, one of the most important dividing lines is the one separating those who advocate a personal conception of God (personal theism) from those who embrace the idea of a God beyond or without being (alterity theism). There is not much dialogue between these groups of scholars; rather the two groups ignore each other, and each party typically believes that there is a fairly straightforward knockdown argument against the other. In this article I explore these two standard objections – the idolatry objection and the no-sense objection – and show why they both fail to be convincing. This failure to convince is a good thing, because it opens up the possibility that both personal theism and alterity theism are legitimate research programmes, each worthy of being further developed in philosophical theology.

What is the point of philosophy of religion? Is it to help us find the right path in life, with the philosopher as guide and mentor? Or is it, as D. Z. Phillips proposes, to contemplate ‘the world in all its variety’, deepening our understanding of multiple perspectives (both religious and non-religious) without trying to appropriate or reject any of them? Recognizing certain shortcomings of the former conception, this article seeks to elucidate the latter and to engage with the critical reception of Phillips's work by other Wittgenstein-influenced philosophers. Towards the end, with reference to Rush Rhees and Wittgenstein, I discuss how giving expression to ‘wonder at what is terrible’ illustrates the ethical demand of a contemplative approach, and in conclusion I offer some thoughts on how this approach could usefully be enriched and extended.

Next to the problem of evil, the problem of divine hiddenness is the most prominent single argument for atheism in the current literature. Most advocates of the problem target what can be termed ‘generic theism’, theism abstracted from any particular religious tradition. Correspondingly most replies are made from the perspective of generic theism. While understandable, this common structure to the dialectic can obscure possible replies centred on the doctrinal resources of particular religions. I argue here that Christian soteriology provides a good reason why God might refrain from making His existence rationally indubitable to all.

In ‘Moral critique and defence of theodicy’ (2013) Samuel Shearn argues that ambitious theodicies trivialize horrendous suffering in an unacceptable way by reinterpreting evils in a way sufferers do not accept. Against Shearn, the authors of this article will argue that sufferer acceptance should not be used as a criterion for the moral acceptability of what theodicies say about horrendous evils. Also, since theodicy is done in the public square, Shearn does not find it relevant to distinguish between contexts in which it is morally improper to communicate theodicies and those in which it is not. We disagree, and present some arguments as to why making such distinctions is morally relevant. Furthermore Shearn argues that theodicy is self-defeating if it aims to comfort sufferers of horrendous evils. We will critically re-examine the examples used to support his conclusion, and suggest that theodicies do have a comforting function. Finally, Shearn describes the difference between theodicy and anti-theodicy as an aesthetic impasse, rather than a moral issue. Against this, we find good reasons to affirm its predominant moral character.