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Religion is not a delusion but a quest for 'home'. Let's locate this here on earth, says Peter Thompson

I keep meaning to post a link to this Face to faith column from 2007 by Peter Thompson in which he introduces Ernst Bloch and now have finally got round to doing it. Here it is:

Religion is not a delusion but a quest for 'home'. Let's locate this here on earth, says Peter Thompson

Peter Thompson has recently written an excellent introduction to a reprint of Bloch's Atheism in Christianity.

The picture  is of a sculpture called Endlose Treppe by Max Bill, and is dedicated to the Principle of Hope by Bloch.
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My name is Andrew James Brown. I’m a philosophically/theologically inclined writer with deep sympathies towards Imaoka Shin’ichirō's understanding of a creative, inquiring, free and liberative religion/spirituality (jiyū shūkyō 自由宗教), Jōdo Shinshū Buddhism, Konkokyo, Christian non-theism, D. G. Leahy’s “thinking now occurring for the first time”, a Lucretian inspired religious naturalism, new materialism and Kyoto School philosophy; also a photographer, cyclist, walker and jazz bass player. In addition to this, I’m the minister of a small, liberal, free-religious community in Cambridge (UK)

Comments

Robin Edgar said…
"Religion is not a delusion but a quest for 'home'. Let's locate this here on earth, says Peter Thompson"

Where else would we locate it?
29 April 2010 at 21:24
Andrew James Brown said…
Dear Robin,

The reference to locating religion on earth is part of Bloch's overall desire to "transcend without transcendence" - to "root" religion explicitly in this world rather than in a transcendent realm of God. That's harder to do than I ever imagined and this blog has become a record of my own struggles to do that in a way appropriate to my own time and place.
30 April 2010 at 10:32
Yewtree said…
A concept that I found useful is the difference between epistemological transcendence (the "here-on-earth" variety, for example the transcendence of individuality by immersion in community, or in the Divine) and ontological transcendence (the idea that the Divine is outside the universe).
5 May 2010 at 10:17
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