What do you think?
Rate this book
What We Mean by Religion
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
June 4, 2012
Sperry was Dean of the Harvard Divinity School for many years. After the countless hours spent in HDS's only lecture hall, the Sperry Room, I could not help but pick up this book when I saw it on the shelves at WCU. It is a collection of lectures on five themes to do with religion delivered at Florida Southern College. Written as fascism and communism were dominating Europe, Sperry did the work you'd expect from a liberal theologian. The lectures drew interesting contrasts between these belief-driven ideologies and other religions, making the point that God in some ways stood in for understanding the limitations of ideology and human perfection that these other belief systems seemed not to accept as they were implemented in Europe. He also made some good, though somewhat standard now, arguments about the need for moral structures within which to interpret science and engineering, making common reference to a nobel-prize winning chemist friend of his. Overall, it was good to step back 70 years and rethink some questions about the relationship between religion, science, and atheist belief structures in that context as I think about the same questions today.
Displaying 1 of 1 review