This contribution to contemporary philosophy of religion turns out to be, as the last chapters unfold, an explication and defense of Josiah Royce's religious philosophy. If confrontations between pragmatism and atheism were this book's subject, Shepherd disguises a clash as a clever collaboration. Philosophy supplies their common ground. His hopes for philosophy of religion, revealed in the final chapter, situate philosophy in a supervisory role over religion. That position is presumed as the first chapter unfolds, which is nominally about New Atheism's tangles, but it is actually about the disciplinary tussle over defining religion. How religion should be understood, and what service to humanity may religion perform, are matters for philosophy's rational adjudication. On that, pragmatism and atheism have heartily agreed. Atheism ably points out religion behaving unreasonably, and pragmatism can point to reasonably religious conduct. Middle chapters about nineteenth- and twentieth-century liberalizations of theology illustrate that twinned critique. An...

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