Social and political scientists, historians and others, have put forward a number of widely differing views concerning the ‘character’ of Islamic millenarian and/or Mahdist movements in Africa. The same is true of course with regard to the opinions ofscholars concerning the transformative capacity of Islam as an ideology. In this paper I want to look at one aspect only of Islamic millenarianism in the West African context, viz. its allegedly revolutionary character.

The ethics of belief does not justify condemning all possible forms of religion even in the absence of evidence for any of them or the presence of evidence against all of them. It follows that attacks on religion like the recent one by Richard Dawkins must fail. The reason is not that there is something wrong with the ethics of belief but that Christian faith need not be a matter of beliefs but can instead be a matter of assumptions to which the faithful person is committed. It follows that Christianity can be compatible with scientific rationality.

Justice will once (more) take the place which the Magians are keeping now, for it is they who lord it over the world.

(Manichaean Homily, fourth century)

The riddle Frazer confronts us with in The Golden Bough is posed in the form of a question. ‘Why is this happening?’ - this life and death of the King of the Wood at Nemi? In the related context of his accounts of the fire-festivals in Europe, Frazer refines the question in a more dramatic form: ‘What is the meaning of such sacrifices? Why were men and animals burnt to death at these festivals?’ Frazer recognizes something serious in all this. The practice of human sacrifice is puzzling; it does leave us disquieted! But Frazer's search for what he calls ‘a fairly probable explanation’ of the motives which gave rise to the priesthood of Nemi and its embodiment of the practice of human sacrifice, Wittgenstein in his ‘Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough’ feels, does not help us to understand a practice like the burning of a man! With all the additional data, numerous theories, and the historical tracing of origins we are no closer to resolving the perplexities of the riddle than the riddle itself presents to us daily.

A noticeable number of contemporary Japanese intellectuals have associated Nichiren (1222–82) with intolerant nationalism and henceforth have viewed him with an air of aloofness, if not of contempt. For these intellectuals, who have come to denounce nationalism and patriotism as a dangerous ideology that led Japan to the tragedy of World War II, Nichiren's passion for Japan runs counter to their decided preference for a man more cosmopolitan in taste, even a man critical of Japan. It is true that the followers of Nichiren attempted to promote Nichiren as a patriotic Buddhist when ultra-nationalistic fervour was steadily advancing Japan as a formidable power in the world through her victory in the Sino-Japanese War in 1895 and the Russo-Japanese War a decade later.1 The image of Nichiren presented by his ultra-nationalistic followers in early modern Japan and by contemporary intellectuals continues to obscure Nichiren's own teaching. The present paper probes Nichiren's attitude toward Japan in the context of his messianic view of history, which constitutes one of the most salient features of Nichiren's teaching of seven centuries ago.

The Oxford English Dictionary says that a rite is ‘a formal procedure or act in a religious or other solemn observance’. The word comes into English through the French rite from the Latin ritus. Its original meaning escapes etymologists; and this is a mixed blessing, for we neither can nor must attempt a retrieval of its hidden roots. We are told by respectable etymologists (if such there be) that the word is associated from earliest times with Latin religious usage, but that even in the early Latin it was already extended to ‘custom, usage, manner or way’ of a non-religious sort. [Lewis and Short, A Latin Dictionary.] So, too, in modern languages the terms ‘rite’ and ‘ritual’ have specifically religious meaning, but they are also used in social and cultural settings that we would not call religious. What first strikes us about the terms ’ and ‘ritual’ is an emphasis upon a certain formality, upon a regular and stable way in which an action or set of actions is to be performed. A ritual is more than a formalism, however, since there are formalisms that are not rites, such as the logical rules for making a valid argument. Moreover, the term is frequently associated with the terms ‘myth’, ‘symbol’ and ‘faith’. These, too, are primarily religious, but are also extended to non-religious contexts. Indeed, there seems to be a network of such terms whose usage touches upon some extraordinary quality in things. Like them, the term ‘ritual’ shares both a wide variety of meanings and a certain hint of impropriety. The variety of ritual forms is notorious, ranging from the most sacred religious liturgies to the absurdities of a fraternity initiation; and the impropriety of the term breaks out whenever we brand a certain action ‘ritualistic’, just as we sometimes refer slightingly to an assertion, saying it is ‘mythical’, ‘merely symbolic’ or ‘credulous’.

In the Encyclopedia of Religion the articles on Islam and the religions of Iran prompt very different reactions. On the Islamic side a third are good, a third bad, and the rest either of indifferent quality or merely straightforward, as is natural in a work of reference. But not only are the bad articles extremely misleading: they are cast in a framework which cannot fail to produce a seriously distorted overall perspective. For the religions of Iran, however, we are given an admirable series of contributions by Gherardo Gnoli, and it is a great pleasure for a British reader to find, in English, a balanced summary of the results of recent Continental scholarship in this field.

If God knows everything he must know the future, and if he knows the future he must know the future acts of his creatures. But then his creatures must act as he knows they will act. How then can they be free? This dilemma has a long history in Christian philosophy and is now as hotly disputed as ever. The medieval scholastics were virtually unanimous in claiming both that God is omniscient and that humans have free will, though they disagreed in their accounts of how the two are compatible. With the Reformation the debate became even more lively since there were Protestant philosophers who denied both claims, and many philosophers ever since have either thought it impossible to reconcile them or have thought it possible only because they weaken one or the other.

In the present paper I consider the plausibility of a mediate natural theology in John Calvin. First, utilizing Robert Audi's distinction between ‘episodically’ and ’structurally’ inferential beliefs, I show that a plausible case can be made for the compatibility of a mediate theology corresponding to both these forms of inferential belief with salient features of Calvin's theology. Second, I apply Calvin's view on arguments for Scripture to theistic belief and suggest a way of construing natural theology as an intra-faith practice aimed at satisfying the cognitive desideratum of reflective nationality–a calvinistic project of fides quaerens intellectum.

In the last ten years or so there has been some lively discussion of the questions of immortality and resurrection. Within the Christian tradition there has been debate at theological and exegetical level over the relative merits of belief in the immortality of the soul, and belief in the resurrection of the dead as an account of life after death. Further to this, however, there has been the suggestion that there may be good philosophical reasons for preferring the latter to the former. It is just this contention which I propose to discuss.

Debate continues to rage among philosophers of religion over Anthony Flew's famous little paper ‘Theology and Falsification’ and the responses it provoked, most notably R. M. Hare's response that religious claims are in no way like scientific hypotheses. For now, twenty years later, we still find many theists taking a similar tack to Hare's. A particularly interesting example is J. F. Miller in Religious Studies, 1969, who replies to Flew that propositions like ‘God loves mankind’ cannot be subject to falsifiability conditions because they are used as claims expressing ‘religious first-order principles of the Judaeo-Christian Weltanschauung and as such are not amenable to falsification’ (p. 50). Miller seems to put his faith in some kind of great gulf fixed between what he would consider decently falsifiable scientific hypotheses and what he takes to be unfalsifiable first-order principles both of theology and of contemporary science. In what follows we will try to sketch a more rational strategy for modern believers of a liberal empiricist type, for those whose interest in appealing and deferring to experience includes but is not restricted to so-called ‘sense experience’. This will involve accepting analogies between theological statements and so-called hypotheses, insofar as the latter are propositions held and put forward in a somewhat tentative spirit with a view to explaining what we experience.

Many analyses of belief in the soul ignore the soul in the words. Dislocations of concepts occur when words are divorced from their normal implications. The ‘soul’ is sometimes the dislocated utterer of such words. Pictures, including pictures of the soul leaving the body, may mislead us by suggesting applications which they, in fact, do not have. But pictures of the soul may enter people's lives as desires for a temporal eternity. Contrasting conceptions of immortality and eternal life depend on a willingness to say farewell to life. Atheistic denials of temporal eternities, do not appreciate these other possibilities.

In what follows I wish to make a contribution to the clarification of the logic of the name ‘God’. I will do so in two stages. In the first stage I will be investigating the meaning of names in general, and how names refer. In the second stage I will attempt to apply the findings of the first stage to the name ‘God’, in light of the way that name functions in religious discourse.

According to the proportionality objection to hell, infinite suffering is out of proportion to any wrong that finite human beings could commit and is hence unjust and inconsistent with God's moral perfection. The continuing-sin response concedes that eternal consignment to hell is out of proportion to the sins people commit during their earthly lives, but argues that people in hell continue to sin while in hell and, in this way, extend their consignment to hell ad infinitum. In this essay, I evaluate the continuing-sin response. In particular, I argue that whether there is a proportionality problem to begin with and whether the continuing-sin response succeeds as a response depends on the character of the suffering that is experienced in hell.

Mircea Eliade's book Yoga: Immortality and Freedom has deservedly become a classic, and has reached, as he intended, a far wider audience than the narrow circle of Indologists. The book's popularity may justify the following remarks. It was originally published in French in 1936, then in an enlarged French version in 1954, and in English translation in 1958. There has thus been ample opportunity for revision, and indeed in the second English edition (1969), which we are taking as our text, Eliade notes (p. xi) that he has made ‘numerous minor corrections’. However, the accuracy of his observations on early Buddhism still leaves much to be desired. Let us try to set the record straight.

The quantitative argument against the notion of a best possible world claims that, no matter how many worthwhile lives a world contains, another world contains more and is, other things being equal, better. Parfit's ‘Mere Addition Paradox’ suggests that defenders of this argument must accept his ‘Repugnant Conclusion’: that outcomes containing billions upon billions of lives barely worth living are better than outcomes containing fewer lives of higher quality. Several responses to the Paradox are discussed and rejected as either inadequate or unavailable in a theistic context. The quantitative argument fails if some world is such that addition to it is not possible, i.e., if it is intensively infinite, as Liebniz claimed. If the notion of such a world is incoherent, then no world is quantitatively best and the quantitative argument succeeds, but only at the cost of embracing the Repugnant Conclusion.

In this essay I describe seven central characteristics of Philip Quinn's approach to the epistemic challenge of religious diversity as they surface in his responses to other contemporary approaches. In the process an assessment is given of Quinn's contribution, and continued relevance, to the contemporary discussions about this topic. The first three sections describe Quinn's confrontations with Alvin Plantinga, William Alston, and John Hick. The next section presents critical comments on Quinn's unique notion of thinning.

This article articulates and defends an underexplored account of faith – the perspectival account of faith – according to which faith is a value-oriented perspective on the world towards which the subject has a pro-attitude. After describing this account of faith and outlining what it is to have faith on the perspectival account, I show that the perspectival account meets methodological criteria for an account of faith. I then show that this account of faith can be used to unify various faith locutions: having faith that p (propositional faith), having faith in something (attitudinal faith), being a person of faith (global faith), articles of faith (creedal faith), and acts of faith (praxical faith). Finally, since the perspectival account of faith is a cognitive account of faith, I defend the perspectival view against objections to cognitive accounts of faith.