ABSTRACT
Henry Nelson Wieman announces his "thesis" in the opening paragraph of The Organization of Interests: Our problem will be to discover that organization of human interests which is most conducive to their maximum fulfillment. When Wieman wrote these words the United States was just entering the "war to end all wars". In this quotation, Wieman speaks of "the most marked development of the newer naturalism". Wieman's opening chapter in The Growth of Religion, "New Growths in Religions", is a discussion of what he considered at the time to be five significant areas of religious activity: Literalism and Traditional Supernaturalism; Humanism; the New Supernaturalism; Theistic Naturalism; and the New Naturalism and the New Supernaturalism Compared. Theistic naturalism is the exact opposite of the new supernaturalism in respect to the use of reason and the empirical method. Immediately, Wieman elaborates on his philosophical assumptions for using the "contextualist" theory of value for his methodology.
