Don Cupitt
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Turns Of Phrase
$28.99Add to cartIn 40 years of writing Don Cupitt has coined many new words and phrases to communicate his ideas, but he has written so much that critics have split him up into stages, and readers complain of obscurity. Piqued, he here represents an entertaining Devils Dictionary of his own ideas, with cross-links from entry to entry guiding the reader around his system. Cupitts teaching is a form of religious naturalism based, not like Spinozas on geometrical reasoning, but upon the more biological idea of an uprush of energies pouring out into symbolic expression. He points out that the non-arrival of the Kingdom left the early Christians looking up vigilantly towards a better world that was yet to come. Today, people no longer expect any further world after this one, and Church-religion no longer works. It is too inhibited. Instead, we need to work out, and start living out, the philosophy and the ethic of the final world, now. It is a world in which the original spirituality of the inner life is replaced by a new religion of
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Fountain : A Secular Theology
$25.99Add to cartDuring the past 30 years, what we used to call ‘the passing show of existence’ has turned into a global torrent of electronic communication and cultural change. Everywhere, Tradition is collapsing. Local fundamentalist reactions hailed by some as evidence that God is back cannot hope to stem the flood. They are merely symptoms of faith’s increasing desperation. In our time, Don Cupitt says, religion is no longer about gaining immortality, or the forgiveness of our sins: it is about becoming reconciled to our life’s transience, to time and death. This ultra-clear and secular ‘theology’ therefore centres around the image of ‘The Fountain’, which close-up, is all noisy, rushing transience, but when we step back becomes a healing, unifying symbol of life’s perpetual self-renewal. This is religious thought with no supernatural world, and with none of the local divine names. But it works.
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Theologys Strange Return
$35.00Add to cartFor two centuries and more our culture has been secular, and no religious doctrine now plays a constitutive part in any established branch of knowledge. Yet if God is dead, he wont lie down, and reminders of the old faith still pervade our language, the built environment, our art and our literature. Most important, themes of the old theology are currently returning to us in new and strange guises. Thus God, the strict Judge who searches our hearts and demands inner integrity, returns in the critical thinking which makes everyone trained it his own hardest taskmaster. Again, the biblical idea that the world is made by the utterance of language returns in modern poetry and linguistic philosophy.aaBy assembling such reminders, Don Cupitt shows that a surprising amount of traditional Christian belief u including a new Grand Narrative, and a non-metaphysical theology u is currently returning to us in secular form.
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Jesus And Philosophy
$28.99Add to cart“Around twenty years or so after his death, the fiery and interesting Jewish teacher Jesus of Nazareth was made into the personification of his own teaching, and given an exalted cosmic status. Within a few decades he had been so completely buried by supernatural beliefs about himself that in all the years since it has been very difficult to make out his own voice, and quite impossible to take him seriously as a thinker. “”Jesus and Philosophy”” asks on the basis of recent reconstructions of his teaching, what was Jesus’ moral philosophy? What was his world view? And, is he a big enough figure in the history of ethics to survive the end of the classic ecclesiastical beliefs about him? The author, Don Cupitt, argues that Jesus will be bigger after Christianity, which blocked the realization of just how revolutionary a figure he was.”
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Old Creed And The New
$35.99Add to cartThe Old Creed and the New, is Don Cupitt’s return to the UK market, after a five year absence, with a successor to his earlier works, which can be seen as the next stage in his long project to modernise religious thought. Here he sharply juxtaposes the traditional Apostles’ Creed of Western Christianity and the emergent creed of modern radical theology. Side by side they look amazingly different, and Cupitt carefully explains what is happening and why. The main change is that the old creed situated the believer within a huge narrative cosmology, the central myth of a great religion-based civilization, whereas the new creed merely defines the bare outlines of a modern spirituality. The difference is very great, and it is vital that we understand it clearly.
Whilst in previous works Cupitt has attempted to define the real religion of modern people, and help them learn religious thinking for themselves in a post-ecclesiastical Christianity, in this book he attempts to bridge the gap between the old way of dogma and Church, and the new, plural, post-ecclesiastical kind of religion.
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Taking Leave Of God
$35.99Add to cartThis was the book which first garnered international celebrity and notoriety for its author and which fire-started a debate about the supernatural claims of Christianity. Rejecting Christian doctrines and metaphysics in favour of the religious consciousness which characterises human identity, Cupitt ‘takes leave’ of God by abandoning objective theism. Because he remained an ordained priest of the Church of England, the author attracted considerable attention and criticism for his position. Indeed, Keith Ward, now Oxford’s Regius Professor of Divinity, wrote an entire book – Holding Fast to God – which attempted to counter Cupitt’s views. Whatever one thinks of the author’s beliefs, Taking Leave of God contributed to one of the most important theological discussions of its time.
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After God : The Future Of Religion
$30.00Add to cartHow can religion survive if, as the renowned scholar Don Cupitt claims, God is dead? In “After God” he takes us through the evolution of religious belief from the dawn of the gods to their twilight. Drawing on examples ranging from Plato to Donald Duck, he eloquently steers us back to an understanding of the supernatural world that every child instinctively has.
