This paper recasts the normative shape of Fear and Trembling by presenting an ‘ethical reading’ based on an ethic of care. It will be argued that Abraham's response represents a commitment to sustain and deepen his fundamental relationship with God, to make absolute his relation to the Absolute. Since most readers tend to focus myopically on ‘the trial’ itself, apart from the context and history of the God-relationship, the proffered interpretations tend inevitably to distort the nature and significance of Abraham's form of life. By remembering the pattern of attachment between God and Abraham, I think that a different normative picture will emerge, one which can be expressed in the grammar of care.

In this paper I defend the possibility that a ‘contented religious exclusivist’, will be fully rational and not neglectful of any of her epistemic duties when faced with the world’s religious diversity. I present an epistemic strategy for reflecting on one's beliefs and then present two features of religious belief that make contented exclusivism a rational possibility. I then argue against the positions of John Hick, David Basinger, and Steven Wykstra on contented exclusivism, and criticize an overly optimistic conception of rationality. Finally, I describe a contented exclusivist who might very well not be fully rational in the face of religious diversity.

An issue much discussed by Indian philosophers and Western philosophers alike is one that concerns the need to assume a continuing self (or subject of experience) in giving an account of the world and our experience of it. This paper concentrates on two arguments put forward by the eighth-century AD Indian philosopher Śankara, in a short passage of his commentary on Bādarāyana's Brahmasūtra. The innovative peculiarity of these arguments is that they rest on an appeal to the content of memory judgements. Śankara takes the line that an analysis of the content of memory judgements shows that a Buddhist attempt to reconstrue memory as mere similarity between successive experiences is fundamentally flawed. Our concern, therefore, is whether Śankara's account of the content of memory judgements is correct, and whether it establishes the required continuity.

Conflict in the testimony of religious experiences appears to seriously undercut its evidential value. Arguments that make positive appeal to the evidence of religious experience usually deal with this objection by denying evidential value to the particularistic elements in such experience as descriptive of an ultimate religious reality and an ultimate human end. Using the work of Jerome Gellman, I contend that the referential value of diverse and particular religious testimony can be saved. I suggest that the strongest form of this argument requires two assumptions: the possibility of multiple religious ends and intrinsic complexity in the religious object. If the argument is valid, these assumptions may also serve as theological criteria.

This paper begins with a revaluation of Carnap's critique of existence questions, and finds that with modification his argument is successful in giving a prima facie cause for doubt that the ontological question addressed by religious realists and non-realists has content. The second part of the paper argues that these doubts can be met with proper attention to the role of truth in the religious realism debate. The paper concludes by arguing for a close relationship between the semantic and the ontological varieties of religious realism.

What does it mean to say that the Bible has authority? The author introduces and develops J. M. Bocheński's philosophical theory about the nature of authority. On this basis, he distinguishes between different kinds of authority, which he applies to the authority of the Bible. Subsequently, he shows that the theory of Bocheński should be improved by reworking it from the perspective of speech-act theory. This leads to the presentation of an overall theory of authority that matches authority in general as well as the authority of the Bible.