Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book discusses Mary Wollstonecraft, Rational Dissent, Latitudinarianism and Cambridge Platonism and establishes that any historical narrative based on the assumption that philosophy of religion was born of an alien invasion of philosophy into theology is substantially flawed. It serves as a corrective to the prevailing understanding of the philosophy of religion, which sees the enterprise, including natural theology, as a-ethical and a-political. The book provides a historical precedent for the contemporary models of natural theology that maintain a commitment to reason while drawing attention to the imaginative ways people see the world, and the ethical import of the ways of seeing. It highlights how the history of the philosophy of religion in modernity has been over-determined by both the dominant form of analytic philosophy of religion and its critics.