School #84
Liberal Theology
Schleiermacher, Tillich, Bultmann, Rauschenbusch, the Niebuhrs
Liberal Theology is the modernist Protestant tradition that begins with Friedrich Schleiermacher's 'On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers' (1799) and 'The Christian Faith' (1821-22), which relocates the ground of religion from propositional revelation or ecclesial authority to the immediate self-consciousness of the "feeling of absolute dependence" (das schlechthinnige Abhängigkeitsgefühl). On this Schleiermacherian foundation, nineteenth- and twentieth-century theologians built a tradition that read Scripture through the historical-critical method, reinterpreted doctrine symbolically, embraced scientific naturalism and modern biblical scholarship, and pushed Christian ethics in the direction of social transformation. Paul Tillich's 'Systematic Theology' (1951-63) and 'The Courage to Be' (1952) recast God as the "ground of being" and faith as "ultimate concern", correlating Christian symbols with the existential questions of the modern situation. Rudolf Bultmann's 'New Testament and Mythology' (1941) proposed to "demythologize" the New Testament — translating its first-century mythic framework into an existentialist call to authentic decision — and his program continues in much mainline biblical scholarship today. Walter Rauschenbusch's 'A Theology for the Social Gospel' (1917) extended the liberal program into social ethics, arguing that the kingdom of God requires the redemption of social structures, not merely individual souls. Reinhold Niebuhr's 'Moral Man and Immoral Society' (1932) and 'The Nature and Destiny of Man' (1941-43), together with his brother H. Richard Niebuhr's 'Christ and Culture' (1951), gave the tradition its characteristic "Christian realism" — sober about sin and structural evil, yet committed to historical action. Contemporary heirs include the mainline Protestant denominations (United Church of Christ, the Episcopal Church, ELCA, PCUSA, the United Methodist Church's liberal wing) and much of the academic theological guild.
Worldview
The liberal-theological adherent inhabits a world that is the medium of divine self-disclosure precisely as natural and historical — a world in which God is not the supernatural intruder of pre-modern theology but the depth-dimension of all that is, encountered most directly in the feeling of absolute dependence (Schleiermacher) and in ultimate concern (Tillich). To live within this ontology is to embrace modern science, accept the historical-critical reading of Scripture, hold doctrines symbolically rather than literalistically, and direct religious energy toward the transformation of unjust social structures. The framework reads this as Personal metaphysical agency: even after symbolic reinterpretation, the liberal-theological God remains a personal God — addressed in prayer, encountered as Thou in Buber's and Tillich's sense, related to in love and trust — not an impersonal cosmic process. The framework reads this as Experience-grounded moral authority: on Schleiermacher's foundational move, religion's ground is the feeling of absolute dependence — primary religious experience, interpreted in dialogue with Scripture, Tradition, and Reason (the Wesleyan quadrilateral, with Experience foundational) — and ultimate concern functions for Tillich as the criterion by which all doctrines and traditions are tested.
Moral Implications
Liberal theology's ethics is structured by the social gospel and Christian realism. Walter Rauschenbusch argued that sin is not merely individual but structural — racism, economic exploitation, militarism, and patriarchy are "kingdoms of evil" that the kingdom of God opposes — and that authentic Christian discipleship therefore requires the transformation of social institutions, not merely the conversion of individuals. Reinhold Niebuhr's realism complicated this with the recognition that human collectives are more selfish than individuals, that all historical action is ambiguous, and that the kingdom is always coming and never fully arrived. The result is a tradition committed to civil rights, economic justice, peace work, women's ordination, LGBTQ+ inclusion, environmental responsibility, and interreligious dialogue — typically expressed institutionally through the mainline denominations' national and ecumenical bodies and the World Council of Churches. Inclusivism or pluralism on salvation is common: God's grace is not restricted to those who have heard and accepted the gospel in the evangelical sense.
Practical Implications
Practically, liberal theology has shaped the institutional life of the historic mainline denominations (UCC, Episcopal, ELCA, PCUSA, UMC), the major divinity schools (Harvard, Yale, Union, Chicago, Vanderbilt, Claremont, Princeton Theological Seminary in its more recent posture), the ecumenical movement, and much of the academic theological guild. Worship in liberal mainline congregations is typically liturgical, lectionary-based, musically refined, and theologically inclusive in its language; preaching engages contemporary social issues in dialogue with biblical texts read historically-critically; sacraments are observed as means of grace without the heavier sacramental ontology of Catholicism or Lutheranism. The tradition has been institutionally generative far out of proportion to its current numerical share — founding hospitals, universities, foreign aid organizations, and civil-society institutions across the world.
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I. Time
Time is finite, relational, one-dimensional, continuous, linear, and uni-directional. Relational because time is understood through the historical-critical lens — time is the medium of historical development, religious evolution, and the cumulative work of interpretation, rather than a Newtonian container. Finite because Big Bang cosmology is accepted as the relevant scientific frame. Non-deterministic time freedom reflects the tradition's libertarian commitment: the future is genuinely open, history is the site of human moral action, and the social gospel's call to "build the kingdom" presupposes that historical outcomes are not pre-fixed. The arrow runs forward: Schleiermacher, Hegel, the Niebuhrs, and Tillich all share a developmental sense of history moving toward fuller realization of God's purposes, though the Niebuhrs in particular chasten this with realism about sin and the tragic character of historical action.
Attributes
Extent: Finite
Ontological Status: Relational
Grain: Continuous
Freedom: Non-Deterministic
Traversability: Linear
Dimensionality: One
Direction: Uni-directional
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II. Space
Space is infinite, substantival, curved, three-dimensional, and local — the space of modern relativistic physics, which liberal theology accepts as the relevant cosmological frame. Curvature reflects the embrace of general relativity; infinity reflects openness to standard scientific cosmology rather than a religiously-mandated finite cosmos. Space is desacralized in any traditional sense — no sacred geographies in the Catholic-Orthodox sense, no holy land that is more holy than other lands — and yet space is also re-sacralized through ecological and social-ethical attentiveness: places matter because communities matter, because creation is the medium of divine life, because environmental justice is part of the gospel.
Attributes
Extent: Infinite
Ontological Status: Substantival
Curvature: Curved
Dimensionality: Three
Locality: Local
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III. Matter
Matter is infinite in extent, relational in ontological status, three-dimensional, conserved, and local. Relational because liberal theology, following Tillich's account of God as the "ground of being" and Schleiermacher's account of all things as participating in absolute dependence, reads matter as constituted by its participation in the encompassing ground rather than as self-subsistent inert stuff. The scientific picture — Big Bang cosmology, evolutionary biology, ecological interdependence — is accepted as the relevant frame, and its relational character (everything is what it is in relation to everything else) is theologically welcomed. Material conservation operates within the standard physical regularities; matter is not sacramentally elevated as in Lutheranism or transubstantiated as in Catholic Thomism, but it is also not the inert substance of mechanistic materialism. The historical-critical method extends to matter itself: the body of Jesus and the empty tomb are read as religiously meaningful symbols rather than as forensic facts to be defended against modern science.
Attributes
Extent: Infinite
Ontological Status: Relational
Conservation: Conserved
Dimensionality: Three
Locality: Local
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IV. Observer
The liberal-theological observer is a finite, historically situated human person whose religious life begins not in submission to external revelation but in the immediate self-awareness Schleiermacher named the "feeling of absolute dependence" — the pre-reflective sense that one's very existence is given, grounded in something beyond oneself. Physicality is embodied: the observer is fully a creature of nature, evolved, social, cultural, and historical, with no Cartesian soul-substance separable from the body, but with the dignity of being addressed by the infinite. Knowledge is immediate (we know from where we stand, embedded in our historical horizon) but retained totally insofar as religious tradition, conscience, and the cumulative wisdom of the community of faith are reliably preserved through interpretation. Agency is active: the liberal-theological tradition is firmly libertarian in temperament, reading the Reformed doctrine of predestination as a moral and intellectual scandal and emphasizing the dignity of human moral decision. Observers are plural — each person stands in their own immediate God-relation, and pluralism among interpreters is welcomed rather than feared. Religious experience is foundational: doctrine is the secondary articulation of primary feeling, and so the observer's own depth of awareness becomes the proper site of theological reflection.
Attributes
Time Instance: Single
Space Instance: Single
Extent of Knowledge: Immediate
Retainment of Knowledge: Total
Physicality: Embodied
Agency: Active
Number: Plural
Metaphysical Agency: Personal
Moral Authority: Experience
Theological Method: Critical
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V. Energy
Energy is infinite in extent and emergent in ontological status — a feature of the natural-physical order, which liberal theology accepts without reservation. Conservation holds, the second law holds, the universe is the universe modern physics describes; there is no liberal-theological reason to expect a different physics. Dispersibility is irreversible: entropy increases, death is real, the cosmos runs its long course. What distinguishes the liberal-theological reading is not a special physics but the interpretation of natural process as bearing religious meaning — the universe's creative emergence, its ecological interdependence, its capacity for novelty and beauty all function as media of the divine. Tillich's "ground of being" is not an alternative source of energy but the depth-dimension of all energy, the answer to the question why there is anything rather than nothing.
Attributes
Extent: Infinite
Ontological Status: Emergent
Conservation: Conserved
Dispersibility: Irreversible
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VI. Information
Information is relational, continuous, and conserved. Relational because liberal theology treats meaning, symbol, and doctrine as constituted by interpretive communities rather than residing in isolated bearers — Scripture means what it means within the history of its reception, and a symbol's power derives from its participation in the reality it symbolizes (Tillich). Continuity matches the smooth historical-critical reading of religious development. Conservation operates on two registers. At the cosmic scale, the divine ground of being — God as the ultimate reality in which all things participate — preserves the meaning of the historical process; nothing genuinely valued is lost to the depths of God (a claim shared with Process Theology). At the personal-identity scale, the soul is conserved, though reinterpreted: most mainline Christians affirm eternal life and continuing relationship with God past death, but the resurrection is read symbolically (Bultmann: the resurrection is not a historical fact about a corpse but the rise of the eschatological self-understanding in the community of faith) and the afterlife is not the literal bodily reanimation of evangelical or Catholic teaching. Personal information is conserved in the sense that the person's meaning is everlastingly held within the divine life.
Attributes
Ontological Status: Relational
Cosmic Conservation: Conserved
Personal Conservation: Conserved
Granularity: Continuous
Films Reading Through This School (1)
Works that name Liberal Theology in their embodiments
Foundational texts that draw on this school, with each work's declared weight.
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On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (Early)
Friedrich Schleiermacher · 1799 (anonymous first ed.); 1806, 1821, 1831 (revised eds with explanations)
The Christian Faith (Mature)
Friedrich Schleiermacher · 1821-22 (first edition); substantially revised 1830-31 (second edition, the standard form)
The Christian Faith (Der christliche Glaube) (Late)
Friedrich Schleiermacher · 1821-22 (rev. 1830-31)
Theology of the New Testament (Late)
Rudolf Bultmann · 1948-53 (Vol I 1948, Vol II 1953; English 1951-55)
Two Concepts of Liberty (Mid)
Isaiah Berlin · 1958 (Inaugural Lecture as Chichele Professor at Oxford)
Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Late)
John Rawls · 2001
Second Treatise of Government (Late)
John Locke · 1689
Soliloquies (Early)
Friedrich Schleiermacher · 1800 (Monologen, Berlin)
Brief Outline of Theology as a Field of Study (Mature)
Friedrich Schleiermacher · 1811 (first edition); substantially revised 1830 (second edition)
The Courage to Be
Paul Tillich · 1952 (Terry Lectures, Yale, 1950)
The Reasonableness of Christianity (Late)
John Locke · 1695
Systematic Theology (Mid)
Paul Tillich · 1951-63 (Vol I 1951, Vol II 1957, Vol III 1963)
Jesus Christ and Mythology (Late)
Rudolf Bultmann · 1958 (Shaffer Lectures at Yale)
The Federalist Papers (Mid)
Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay · 1787-88 (Independent Journal, New York Packet, Daily Advertiser)
Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Mid)
Robert Nozick · 1974
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Late)
Mary Wollstonecraft · 1792
The Feminine Mystique (Late)
Betty Friedan · 1963
The Spirit of the Laws (De l'esprit des lois) (Late)
Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu · 1748
Philosophical Letters (Lettres Philosophiques / Lettres Anglaises) (Mid)
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) · 1734
The End of History and the Last Man (Mid)
Francis Fukuyama · 1992
Notes on the State of Virginia (Mid)
Thomas Jefferson · 1781-82 (composed); 1785 (Paris edn); 1787 (London edn)
Common Sense (Mid)
Thomas Paine · 1776 (January)
A Theology for the Social Gospel (Late)
Walter Rauschenbusch · 1917
New Testament and Mythology (Late)
Rudolf Bultmann · 1941
Colloquia (Mature (the work that grew through Erasmus's most productive decades and was repeatedly enlarged))
Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam · 1518 (first edition Familiarium Colloquiorum Formulae); enlarged 1519, 1522, 1524, 1526, 1529, 1533
Traité sur la tolérance (Late (the campaign-treatise of the Ferney period))
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) · 1763 (Traité sur la tolérance à l'occasion de la mort de Jean Calas)
Divinity School Address (Mature)
Ralph Waldo Emerson · 1838 (delivered July 15, 1838, at Harvard Divinity School; published as An Address Delivered before the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge, 1838)
The Inward Journey (Late-mature)
Howard Thurman · 1961
The Varieties of Religious Experience
William James · 1901–02 (Gifford Lectures, Edinburgh); 1902 (book form)
A Letter Concerning Toleration (Late)
John Locke · Written in Latin 1685 in Holland; published anonymously 1689 (Latin and English)
The Nature and Destiny of Man (Mid-late (Niebuhr's major systematic work))
Reinhold Niebuhr · 1941 (vol. I, Human Nature); 1943 (vol. II, Human Destiny) — based on the Gifford Lectures, Edinburgh, 1939
Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (Late (Berlin lectures))
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel · 1821-31 (delivered as lectures); 1832 (compiled and published posthumously)
Praise of Folly (Mid (Erasmus's most widely read book))
Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam · 1509 (composed during a visit to Thomas More); 1511 (first published)
Answer to Job (Late)
Carl Gustav Jung · 1952
Reflections on the Revolution in France (Late)
Edmund Burke · 1790
The Hedgehog and the Fox (Mid)
Isaiah Berlin · 1953
Frontiers of Justice (Late)
Martha C. Nussbaum · 2006
Candide (Candide, ou l'Optimisme) (Late)
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) · 1759
Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (Late)
Robert D. Putnam · 2000
Greek New Testament (Novum Instrumentum) (Mature (the work that established Erasmus's international reputation and reshaped biblical scholarship))
Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam · 1516 (Novum Instrumentum omne, Froben, Basel — first edition); revised 1519, 1522, 1527, 1535
Letters to the Son of the Wolf (Last (less than a year before his 1892 death))
Bahá'u'lláh (Mírzá Ḥusayn-ʻAlí Núrí) · 1891 (composed in 'Akká)
Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina (Mature (composed at the height of the developing controversy with Rome))
Galileo Galilei · 1615 (composed; circulated in manuscript; first published 1636 in Strasbourg)
Race Matters (Mature (the book that established West as a major public intellectual))
Cornel West · 1993 (Beacon Press; 25th anniversary edition 2017)
Democracy Matters (Late-mature (the post-9/11 sequel to the 1993 Race Matters))
Cornel West · 2004 (Penguin)
Asa Di Var (Mature)
Guru Nānak Dev Ji · c. 1500-1539 (Nānak's mature teaching years; included in the Guru Granth Sahib 1604)
Measure for Measure (Mature)
William Shakespeare · c. 1603-04
Religion and Science (Mid-mature)
Albert Einstein · 1930 (published New York Times Magazine, November 9, 1930)
Jesus and the Disinherited (Mature)
Howard Thurman · 1949
The Kingdom of God Is Within You (Late)
Leo Tolstoy · Written 1890–93; banned in Russia, published 1894 in Berlin
Revelations of Divine Love
Julian of Norwich · May 1373 (the showings); short text c. 1380; long text c. 1395 (revised over twenty years)
Gettysburg Address (Mature (Civil War))
Abraham Lincoln · November 19, 1863 (delivered 4½ months after the Battle of Gettysburg, July 1–3, 1863)
Enchiridion Militis Christiani (Early (Erasmus's first major work))
Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam · 1503 (with a famous expanded 1518 preface that became a humanist-Reformation manifesto)
Gitanjali (Mid (the Nobel-winning collection))
Rabindranath Tagore · 1910 (Bengali original); 1912 (Tagore's own English prose translation)
Sadhana: The Realisation of Life (Mid (the major philosophical prose statement))
Rabindranath Tagore · 1913 (the Hibbert Lectures, Harvard; published 1913)
Moral Man and Immoral Society (Early-mid (Niebuhr's breakthrough book that established Christian realism))
Reinhold Niebuhr · 1932
Adagia (Long (composed across Erasmus's entire mature career))
Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam · 1500 (1st edition, c. 800 adages); 1536 (final edition, c. 4,151 adages)
Modern Man in Search of a Soul (Mid-late (mature systematic statement))
Carl Gustav Jung · 1933 (essay collection, English translation by Cary F. Baynes)
Kitáb-i-Íqán (Mid (pre-declaration in 1863))
Bahá'u'lláh (Mírzá Ḥusayn-ʻAlí Núrí) · 1862 (composed in Baghdad in two days and two nights, in response to questions from one of the Báb's maternal uncles)
Why Not the Best? (Mid (pre-presidential))
James Earl Carter Jr. · 1975 (campaign biography for the 1976 presidential campaign)
A Vindication of the Rights of Men (Early (preceding the more famous 1792 Vindication of the Rights of Woman))
Mary Wollstonecraft · 1790 (the first major published response to Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France)
First Inaugural Address (Mid (the inauguration after twelve years of Republican presidency))
William J. Clinton · January 20, 1993
Greek New Testament (Novum Instrumentum) (Mid)
Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam · 1516
Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Late (the major autobiographical work))
Carl Gustav Jung · 1957-61 (recorded conversations with Aniela Jaffé); published 1962
My Life (Late)
William J. Clinton · 2004
Promises to Keep (Mid)
Joseph R. Biden Jr. · 2007
The Prophetic Faith (Late)
Martin Buber · 1949 (German); 1948 (Hebrew)
Systematic Theology (Late)
Wolfhart Pannenberg · 1988-93 (3 vols; English 1991-98)
Spheres of Justice (Mid)
Michael Walzer · 1983
Christ in a Pluralistic Age (Mid)
John B. Cobb Jr. · 1975
Historical and Critical Dictionary (Dictionnaire Historique et Critique) (Late)
Pierre Bayle · 1697 (2nd expanded edn 1702)
1984 (Nineteen Eighty-Four) (Late)
George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair) · 1949
Christ and Culture (Late)
H. Richard Niebuhr · 1951
Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (Late (Murdoch's longest and most ambitious philosophical book, published nine years after the Gifford Lectures))
Iris Murdoch · 1992 (Chatto & Windus, based on the 1982 Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh)
The Bell (Early-mature (Murdoch's fourth novel, the first to establish her mature manner))
Iris Murdoch · 1958 (Chatto & Windus)
An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution (Late (Wollstonecraft's last completed major non-fiction work, three years before her death))
Mary Wollstonecraft · 1794 (Vol. I only — the projected continuation was never written)
Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (Early (Wollstonecraft's first published book, written from her experience as a governess and a school proprietress))
Mary Wollstonecraft · 1787 (J. Johnson, London)
The Undiscovered Self (Late (one of Jung's last short works, written at 82))
Carl Gustav Jung · 1957 (Schweizer Monatshefte; book edition Rascher, Zurich; English trans. R.F.C. Hull, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1958)
De Libero Arbitrio (Late (the treatise that publicly broke the Erasmus-Luther alliance, written after seven years of pressure for Erasmus to declare his position))
Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam · 1524 (De Libero Arbitrio ΔΙΑΤΡΙΒΗ sive Collatio, Froben, Basel)
My Bondage and My Freedom (Mature (Douglass's second autobiography, written after his break with Garrison and the founding of his own newspaper))
Frederick Douglass · 1855 (Miller, Orton & Mulligan, New York)
The American Evasion of Philosophy (Mature (West's major work of intellectual history, written before the Race Matters celebrity))
Cornel West · 1989 (Wisconsin UP)
Julie (Mature (the literary high-point of Rousseau's career, between Social Contract and Émile))
Jean-Jacques Rousseau · 1761 (Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse: Lettres de deux amants, habitants d'une petite ville au pied des Alpes, Amsterdam)
De Beneficiis (Mid-mature (composed during Seneca's most influential political-philosophical period))
Lucius Annaeus Seneca · c. 56-62 CE (Nero's court, before Seneca's retirement)
Japji Sahib (Mature (Nānak's foundational devotional composition))
Guru Nānak Dev Ji · c. 1499-1539 (during Nānak's later teaching years; the morning prayer is one of his foundational compositions)
Summer Meditations (Late (the first major post-1989 reflection on the transition from dissidence to governance))
Václav Havel · 1991 (Letní přemítání, composed during Havel's first eighteen months as Czechoslovak president after the November 1989 Velvet Revolution)
Philemon (Late)
Paul of Tarsus (Saul / Saint Paul) · c. 60-62 CE (composed in prison alongside Colossians)
The World as I See It (Mid-mature)
Albert Einstein · 1934 (German: Mein Weltbild, Querido Verlag, Amsterdam; English: Covici Friede, New York)
Out of My Later Years (Late)
Albert Einstein · 1950 (Philosophical Library, New York)
Discourse on Metaphysics (Mature)
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz · 1686 (composed February 1686; first published 1846)
The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth (Late)
Thomas Jefferson · c. 1820 (compiled), published 1904
Ethics for the New Millennium (Late)
Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama · 1999
Original Stories from Real Life (Early)
Mary Wollstonecraft · 1788
Leviathan
Thomas Hobbes · 1651
On Liberty
John Stuart Mill · 1859
Utilitarianism
John Stuart Mill · 1861 (Fraser's Magazine); 1863 (book form)
A Theory of Justice
John Rawls · 1971; revised edition 1999
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Late)
Adam Smith · 1776 (first ed.); five revised editions in Smith's lifetime
A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (Early)
George Berkeley · 1710 (Dublin, age 25)
Two Treatises of Government (Late)
John Locke · Written c. 1679–82; published anonymously 1689
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (Late)
David Hume · Drafted 1751–61; revised continuously; published posthumously 1779
Critique of Practical Reason (Late)
Immanuel Kant · 1788
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Mary Wollstonecraft · 1792 (London, six weeks)
Democracy in America
Alexis de Tocqueville · Volume I 1835; Volume II 1840 (based on Tocqueville's 1831–32 American journey)
The Human Condition
Hannah Arendt · 1958
The Open Society and Its Enemies
Karl R. Popper · Composed 1938–1943 in New Zealand exile; published 1945 (2 vols)
Theological-Political Treatise (Early)
Baruch Spinoza · 1670 (anonymously, with false imprint)
The Natural History of Religion (Late)
David Hume · 1757 (Four Dissertations)
Political Liberalism (Late)
John Rawls · 1993 (revised 1996, with new introduction)
The Subjection of Women (Late)
John Stuart Mill · Written 1860–61 with Harriet Taylor Mill's collaboration; published 1869
The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Early-to-late (he revised it throughout his life))
Adam Smith · 1759 (1st edition); 1790 (6th and definitive edition with substantial additions)
Second Inaugural Address (Late (six weeks before assassination))
Abraham Lincoln · March 4, 1865 (six weeks before his assassination)
The Problem of Pain (Mid (post-conversion, pre-Narnia))
C. S. Lewis · 1940
Theodicy (Late)
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz · 1710 (the only philosophical book Leibniz published in his lifetime)
A Plain Account of Christian Perfection (Late)
John Wesley · 1766 (with revisions through 1777; published as a unified text in 1777)
The Will to Believe (Mid (between Principles of Psychology and Varieties of Religious Experience))
William James · 1897 (title essay, addressed to the Philosophical Clubs of Yale and Brown, 1896)
Adventures of Ideas (Late (Whitehead's last major book))
Alfred North Whitehead · 1933
The Sovereignty of Good (Mid (her major philosophical statement, alongside Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals 1992))
Iris Murdoch · 1970 (collecting essays from 1956-67)
The Epistle to the Romans (Early (the breakthrough work))
Karl Barth · 1919 (first edition); 1922 (second edition — the famous and influential one, almost completely rewritten)
The Social Contract (Late (after the two Discourses; the political conclusion of Rousseau's mature thought))
Jean-Jacques Rousseau · 1762
Émile (Late)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau · 1762 (published the same year as the Social Contract; both condemned and burned by authorities)
Ideas and Opinions (Late (the most comprehensive single-volume collection))
Albert Einstein · 1954 (collected from earlier essays and addresses)
Science and the Modern World (Mid (the major statement of philosophical-cultural critique, preceding the technical metaphysics of Process and Reality))
Alfred North Whitehead · 1925 (the Lowell Lectures, Harvard; the proximate prelude to Process and Reality, 1929)
Letter from Birmingham Jail (Mid (the canonical theological-political document))
Martin Luther King Jr. · April 16, 1963 (written in jail in response to a published statement by eight Alabama clergymen criticising King's direct-action methods)
Strength to Love (Mid (the major collection of sermons))
Martin Luther King Jr. · 1963 (collected sermons; some preached at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church Montgomery in the 1950s)
Tales of the Hasidim (Late (Buber's mature engagement with the Hasidic tradition))
Martin Buber · 1947 (The Early Masters); 1948 (The Later Masters); compiled over decades of Buber's engagement with Hasidism
The Irony of American History (Late (Niebuhr's major Cold War political-theological book))
Reinhold Niebuhr · 1952
Lectures on the Philosophy of History (Late (Berlin lectures of the 1820s, his mature mature))
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel · 1822-31 (delivered as lectures); 1837 (compiled and published posthumously by Eduard Gans)
Scivias (Early (the first of her three major visionary works))
Hildegard of Bingen · 1141-51 (composed in the decade after Hildegard's call to write, ten years after entering the monastic life)
Principles of Political Economy (Mid (Mill's major economic work))
John Stuart Mill · 1848 (1st edition); revised through 1871 (7th edition)
Difficult Freedom (Mid (alongside Totality and Infinity))
Emmanuel Levinas · 1963 (collecting essays from the 1950s-60s)
Liber Vitae Meritorum (Mid (the middle volume of the visionary trilogy))
Hildegard of Bingen · 1158-63 (the middle work of the visionary trilogy, between Scivias and Liber Divinorum Operum)
Essays in Zen Buddhism (Mid (Suzuki's major early period of Western dissemination))
Daisetsu Teitarō Suzuki · 1927 (First Series), 1933 (Second), 1934 (Third) — published in English by Rider & Co. London
Outlines of Mahayana Buddhism (Early (Suzuki's first major book; preceding the Essays in Zen Buddhism by twenty years))
Daisetsu Teitarō Suzuki · 1907 (Suzuki's first major book in English, written during his work with Paul Carus at the Open Court Press)
Kitáb-i-Aqdas (Late (the major late doctrinal-legal book))
Bahá'u'lláh (Mírzá Ḥusayn-ʻAlí Núrí) · 1873 (in 'Akká, the prison-city where Bahá'u'lláh was exiled)
The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (Late (the mature systematic statement of archetypal psychology))
Carl Gustav Jung · 1934-55 (essays composed across two decades); 1959 (compiled as Volume 9, Part 1 of the Collected Works)
A Time for Choosing (Early (launched Reagan's political career))
Ronald W. Reagan · October 27, 1964 (broadcast nationally on behalf of Goldwater)
Tear Down This Wall (Late (Reagan presidency at its rhetorical peak))
Ronald W. Reagan · June 12, 1987 (delivered at the Brandenburg Gate, West Berlin)
Faust, Part I (Mid (composed across Goethe's career; Part I the major mid-career work))
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · 1772-1808 (composed across decades; Part I published 1808; Part II completed 1832, posthumous)
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Mid)
Richard Rorty · 1989
Achieving Our Country (Late)
Richard Rorty · 1998
Some Thoughts Concerning Education (Late)
John Locke · 1693
Symphonia harmoniae caelestium revelationum (Mid-late)
Hildegard of Bingen · c. 1150-79
Mysticism: Christian and Buddhist (Late)
Daisetsu Teitarō Suzuki · 1957
The Hidden Words (Early)
Bahá'u'lláh (Mírzá Ḥusayn-ʻAlí Núrí) · 1858
An American Life (Late)
Ronald W. Reagan · 1990
Principles of Nature and Grace (Late)
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz · 1714
Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Late)
Thomas Merton · 1966
Mystics and Zen Masters (Late)
Thomas Merton · 1967
Eclipse of God (Late)
Martin Buber · 1952
The Symbolism of Evil (Early)
Paul Ricoeur · 1960 (French; English 1967)
Memory, History, Forgetting (Late)
Paul Ricoeur · 2000 (French; English 2004)
Between Facts and Norms (Late)
Jürgen Habermas · 1992 (German; English 1996)
Truth and Method (Mid)
Hans-Georg Gadamer · 1960 (German; English 1975, 2nd rev. ed. 1989)
Democracy and Education (Mid)
John Dewey · 1916
The Philosophy of Loyalty (Late)
Josiah Royce · 1908
Church Dogmatics (Mid)
Karl Barth · 1932-67 (14 volumes, unfinished)
A Community of Character (Mid)
Stanley Hauerwas · 1981
Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Early)
Michael J. Sandel · 1982 (2nd edn 1998)
Sources of the Self (Mid)
Charles Taylor · 1989
A Secular Age (Late)
Charles Taylor · 2007 (Gifford Lectures 1998-99 at Edinburgh, extensively expanded)
The Concept of the Political (Mid)
Carl Schmitt · 1932 (revised from 1927 essay; English 1976)
Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes (Late)
Charles Hartshorne · 1984
Ethics (Ethik) (Late)
Dietrich Bonhoeffer · 1940-43 (unfinished; first German edition 1949)
On First Principles (Peri Archōn / De Principiis) (Early)
Origen of Alexandria · c. 230
Hymns of Divine Love (Hymnoi tōn Theiōn Erōtōn) (Late)
St. Symeon the New Theologian · c. 1020
Triads (Triads in Defense of the Holy Hesychasts) (Late)
St. Gregory Palamas · 1338-41
The Bride of the Lamb (Late)
Sergei Bulgakov · composed 1939-42; published 1945 posthumously
Sic et Non (Yes and No) (Early)
Peter Abelard · c. 1121
Didascalicon (On the Study of Reading) (Early)
Hugh of St Victor · c. 1127
The Dark Night (La Noche Oscura) (Late)
St. John of the Cross (Juan de Yepes Álvarez) · c. 1582-85
The Interior Castle (Castillo Interior) (Late)
St. Teresa of Ávila (Teresa Sánchez de Cepeda y Ahumada) · 1577
The Mirror of Simple Souls (Le Mirouer des Simples Âmes) (Late)
Marguerite Porete · c. 1295
Discourses on Livy (Discorsi sopra la prima Deca di Tito Livio) (Late)
Niccolò Machiavelli · 1517 (published 1531)
New Science (Late)
Giambattista Vico · 1725 (1st edn); 1730 (2nd); 1744 (3rd, definitive)
Utopia (De Optimo Reipublicae Statu deque Nova Insula Utopia) (Mid)
St. Thomas More · 1516
A Confession (Ispoved') (Late)
Leo Tolstoy · 1882
Leaves of Grass (Late)
Walt Whitman · 1855 (1st edn); 1881 (definitive); 1892 (deathbed)
Philosophy as Metanoetics (Zangedō to shite no tetsugaku) (Late)
Tanabe Hajime · 1946
The Justification of the Good (Opravdanie dobra) (Late)
Vladimir Solovyov · 1897
An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (Mid)
John Henry Newman · 1845 (rev. 1878)
The Age of Reason (Late)
Thomas Paine · 1794 (Part I); 1795 (Part II); 1807 (Part III)
The World and the Individual (Mid)
Josiah Royce · 1899-1901 (Gifford Lectures at Aberdeen)
Twenty Years at Hull-House (Late)
Jane Addams · 1910
The Long Loneliness (Late)
Dorothy Day · 1952
The Hindu View of Life (Mid)
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan · 1926 (Upton Lectures at Oxford, 1926)
Gaudium et Spes (Late)
Second Vatican Council · 1965 (7 December)
Paradise Lost (Late)
John Milton · 1667 (1st edn, 10 books); 1674 (2nd edn, 12 books)
An Essay on Man (Late)
Alexander Pope · 1733-34
A Room of One's Own (Late)
Virginia Woolf · 1929
The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg) (Late)
Thomas Mann · 1912-24 (composed); 1924 (published)
Middlemarch (Late)
George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) · 1871-72
Animal Liberation (Mid)
Peter Singer · 1975
Liquid Modernity (Late)
Zygmunt Bauman · 2000
The Fall of Public Man (Mid)
Richard Sennett · 1977
The Life of the Mind (Late)
Hannah Arendt · 1977-78 (Vol I Thinking; Vol II Willing; Vol III Judging unfinished at her death)
Long Walk to Freedom (Late)
Nelson Mandela · 1994
The Doctor and the Soul: From Psychotherapy to Logotherapy (Mid)
Viktor Frankl · 1946
Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Le Capital au XXIe siècle) (Late)
Thomas Piketty · 2013 (French); 2014 (English)
Confessions (Late)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau · 1769 (composed); 1782-89 (posthumous)
On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (Late)
David Ricardo · 1817
God-Christ-Church: A Practical Guide to Process Theology (Late)
Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki · 1989 (rev. ed.; orig. 1982)
Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition (Mid)
John B. Cobb Jr. and David Ray Griffin · 1976
The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (Late (Bergson's last major book, written after a long convalescence))
Henri Bergson · 1932 (Les Deux Sources de la morale et de la religion, Paris: Alcan; English trans. R. Ashley Audra & Cloudesley Brereton 1935)
Iggeret Teiman (Epistle to Yemen, c. 1172) and the responsa (Middle (between the Commentary on the Mishnah, 1168, and the Mishneh Torah, completed 1178))
Moses Maimonides (Rambam) · c. 1172
Men in Dark Times (Late (collected from essays spanning more than a decade))
Hannah Arendt · 1968 (Harcourt Brace; essays composed 1955-67, several in New Yorker, Merkur, etc.)
Miracles: A Preliminary Study (Mature (after Mere Christianity and Screwtape; the most philosophical of Lewis's apologetic works))
C. S. Lewis · 1947 (Bles, London; revised 1960 chapter 3 after Anscombe's 1948 Socratic Club critique)
The Dialogue of Divine Providence (Late (composed in Catherine's last two years, in the midst of her efforts to reform the Church and end the Avignon papacy))
Catherine of Siena (Caterina Benincasa) · c. 1377-78 (composed by dictation in ecstatic states; Catherine could read with difficulty and probably could not write)
Kyōgyōshinshō (Mature)
Shinran · c. 1224; revised through c. 1247
Tannishō (Posthumous (the principal popular source for Shinran's teaching))
Shinran · c. 1290 (compiled by Yuien-bō about 30 years after Shinran's death)
Seven Valleys and Four Valleys (Early (composed before the 1863 proclamation))
Bahá'u'lláh (Mírzá Ḥusayn-ʻAlí Núrí) · c. 1856 (Seven Valleys) and c. 1858 (Four Valleys), both Baghdad period
Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (Late (Douglass's third autobiography, covering his post-1855 political career))
Frederick Douglass · 1881 (Park Publishing, Hartford); expanded edition 1892 (De Wolfe, Fiske, Boston)
Dictionnaire philosophique (Late (composed during the Ferney years))
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) · 1764 (Dictionnaire philosophique portatif, Geneva; greatly expanded through 1769)
Political Treatise (Late (Spinoza's last work, left incomplete at his death))
Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza · 1675-77 (unfinished at Spinoza's 1677 death; published posthumously as part of the Opera Posthuma)
Reveries of the Solitary Walker (Last (composed in Rousseau's final two years, after he had retreated from public life))
Jean-Jacques Rousseau · 1776-78 (unfinished at Rousseau's death; published posthumously 1782)
Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Late (Seneca's last completed major work, composed in retirement))
Lucius Annaeus Seneca · 63-65 CE (Seneca's last years, after retirement from Nero's court and before his forced suicide)
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (Mature)
Simone de Beauvoir · 1958 (Gallimard)
A Very Easy Death (Late)
Simone de Beauvoir · 1964 (Gallimard)
Between the Acts (Last)
Virginia Woolf · 1940-41 (Hogarth, posthumous July 1941; Woolf died March 28, 1941)
Pure Lust (Late-mature)
Mary Daly · 1984 (Beacon Press)
Politics and Conscience (Mature (composed during Havel's dissident period before the 1989 Velvet Revolution))
Václav Havel · 1984 (composed in Czechoslovakia under Communist authority; prepared as the acceptance speech for an honorary degree from the University of Toulouse that Havel could not attend)
Disturbing the Peace (Late-dissident (composed three years before the Velvet Revolution))
Václav Havel · 1985-86 (long interview composed by mail between Havel in Prague and Karel Hvížďala in West Germany)
Romans (Mature (Paul's most extensive and systematic letter))
Paul of Tarsus (Saul / Saint Paul) · c. 56-58 CE (composed in Corinth, near the end of Paul's third missionary journey)
1 Corinthians (Mature)
Paul of Tarsus (Saul / Saint Paul) · c. 53-55 CE (composed in Ephesus during Paul's third missionary journey)
2 Corinthians (Mature)
Paul of Tarsus (Saul / Saint Paul) · c. 55-56 CE (composed in Macedonia after a difficult Corinthian crisis)
Galatians (Mature)
Paul of Tarsus (Saul / Saint Paul) · c. 48-55 CE (either earliest or middle Pauline letter)
Philippians (Late)
Paul of Tarsus (Saul / Saint Paul) · c. 60-62 CE (from prison — Rome, Ephesus, or Caesarea)
1 Thessalonians (Early)
Paul of Tarsus (Saul / Saint Paul) · c. 50-51 CE (earliest surviving Pauline letter)
Macbeth (Mature)
William Shakespeare · c. 1606
The Tempest (Last (probably Shakespeare's last sole-authored play))
William Shakespeare · c. 1610-11 (first performed Whitehall, 1 November 1611)
Resistance to Civil Government (Mature)
Henry David Thoreau · 1849 (first published as "Resistance to Civil Government" in Aesthetic Papers; reprinted posthumously as "Civil Disobedience" in 1866)
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (Early-mature)
Henry David Thoreau · 1849 (composed during Thoreau's Walden Pond years 1845-47; published 1849 at Thoreau's own expense)
A Plea for Captain John Brown (Mature)
Henry David Thoreau · 1859 (delivered as a public address in Concord, Boston, and Worcester, October-November 1859; published 1860)
Slavery in Massachusetts (Mature)
Henry David Thoreau · 1854 (delivered at the antislavery convention, Framingham, July 4, 1854; published in The Liberator and other papers)
The American Scholar (Mature)
Ralph Waldo Emerson · 1837 (delivered August 31, 1837, at the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard; first published as An Oration Delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, 1837)
Essays: First Series (Mature)
Ralph Waldo Emerson · 1841 (James Munroe & Co., Boston)
Representative Men (Mature)
Ralph Waldo Emerson · 1850 (Phillips, Sampson & Co., Boston; based on lectures delivered 1845-46)
Surprised by Joy (Late-mature)
C. S. Lewis · 1955 (Geoffrey Bles, London)
The Sea, The Sea (Late-mature)
Iris Murdoch · 1978 (Chatto & Windus); Booker Prize 1978
A Pluralistic Universe (Late)
William James · 1909 (Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College, Oxford, May 1908)
Eyeless in Gaza (Mid-mature)
Aldous Huxley · 1936
Brave New World Revisited (Late)
Aldous Huxley · 1958
Purgatorio (Mature)
Dante Alighieri · c. 1314-19
De Monarchia (Late)
Dante Alighieri · c. 1313-18 (during Dante's exile)
On Free Will (Mature)
Anselm of Canterbury · c. 1080-85
Faust II (Last)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · 1825-31 (completed shortly before Goethe's 1832 death; published posthumously 1832)
The Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence (Last)
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz · 1715-16 (5 letters from Leibniz, 5 replies from Clarke); published 1717
Go Tell It on the Mountain (Early)
James Baldwin · 1953
The Meaning of the Creative Act (Early-mature)
Nikolai Berdyaev · 1916 (Smysl tvorchestva)
Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life (Late)
Hilary Putnam · 2008
Faṣl al-Maqāl (The Decisive Treatise) (Mature)
Ibn Rushd (Averroes) · c. 1179
Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Late)
Eleanor Roosevelt · 1947-48 (drafted), December 10, 1948 (adopted)
You Learn by Living (Late)
Eleanor Roosevelt · 1960
Tomorrow Is Now (Late)
Eleanor Roosevelt · 1962 (written, unfinished at her death), 1963 (published posthumously)
Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion (Early)
Benjamin Franklin · 1728
A Confession (Mid)
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy · 1880-82
What I Believe (Mid)
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy · 1883-84
The Death of Ivan Ilyich (Late)
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy · 1886
Resurrection (Late)
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy · 1889-1899
The Idea of a Christian Society (Mid)
Thomas Stearns Eliot · 1939
Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (Late)
Mary Wollstonecraft · 1795-96 (composed), 1796 (published)
The Audacity of Hope (Mid)
Barack H. Obama · 2006
2004 Democratic National Convention Keynote Address (Early)
Barack H. Obama · 2004 (July 27, 2004)
Edition of Augustine (Late)
Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam · 1528-29
Edition of Origen (Late)
Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam · 1536 (posthumous)
Mere Christianity
C. S. Lewis · 1941–44 (BBC talks); 1952 (single-volume book form)
Letters and Papers from Prison (Late)
Dietrich Bonhoeffer · 1943–45 (Tegel and Flossenbürg prisons); 1951 (first German edition by Eberhard Bethge)
An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (Late)
John Henry Newman · 1870
Politics
Aristotle · c. 335 BC (lecture course, Lyceum)
The Imitation of Christ
Thomas à Kempis (traditional attribution; sometimes attributed to Geert Groote or composite) · c. 1418–1427 (Mount St Agnes monastery, Zwolle, Netherlands)
De Cive (Early)
Thomas Hobbes · 1642 (Latin, Paris); English translation by Hobbes himself 1651
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals
Immanuel Kant · 1785
Critique of Judgment (Late)
Immanuel Kant · 1790
Theory of Communicative Action
Jürgen Habermas · 1981 (German, 2 vols)
The Brothers Karamazov (Late)
Fyodor Dostoevsky · 1879–1880 (serialised in The Russian Messenger)
Laws (Latest)
Plato · Composed late in life (final years before 347 BC); unrevised at his death
Apologia Pro Vita Sua (Late)
John Henry Newman · 1864 (in seven weekly instalments)
Pragmatism (Late)
William James · 1907 (from 1906 Lowell Lectures, Boston)
Cur Deus Homo (Late)
Anselm of Canterbury · 1094–1098 (Capua and Canterbury)
The Revival of the Religious Sciences (Late (post-crisis))
Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī · c. 1097-1106 (composed during al-Ghazali's years of withdrawal after the 1095 spiritual crisis)
Deliverance from Error (Late)
Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī · c. 1108 (late in al-Ghazali's life, after returning to teaching)
Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Mid-late (the second of the After Virtue trilogy))
Alasdair MacIntyre · 1988
Why I Am Not a Christian (Mid-late)
Bertrand Russell · 1927 (lecture); 1957 (collected essays as a book)
The Concept of Anxiety (Mid (the productive year of 1844 — Concept of Anxiety, Philosophical Fragments, etc.))
Søren Kierkegaard · 1844 (published under the pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis)
A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (Mid (Northampton pastorate; the major work of evangelical reflection))
Jonathan Edwards · 1746
I and Thou (Mid (the foundational statement of dialogical philosophy))
Martin Buber · 1923
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Mid-late (after The Human Condition, before The Life of the Mind))
Hannah Arendt · 1963 (New Yorker articles 1962-63, then book)
Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Late (the mature systematic philosophy))
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel · 1820 (published 1821 with the famous controversial Preface)
Works of Love (Late (after the pseudonymous works; the major direct theological work))
Søren Kierkegaard · 1847 (published under his own name, not pseudonymous)
Essays: First Series (Mid (Emerson at the peak of his powers))
Ralph Waldo Emerson · 1841 (twelve essays collected from earlier lectures and journal entries)
The Origins of Totalitarianism (Mid (Arendt's breakthrough book))
Hannah Arendt · 1951 (with later editions adding new prefaces and material through 1968)
On Revolution (Late (after Eichmann in Jerusalem))
Hannah Arendt · 1963
Life Together (Mid (between the Cost of Discipleship and the prison theology))
Dietrich Bonhoeffer · 1939 (drawn from the Finkenwalde seminary, 1935-37)
The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Early (the breakthrough work))
Jürgen Habermas · 1962 (habilitation thesis; English translation 1989)
The Origin of German Tragic Drama (Early (the most ambitious early work, before the Arcades Project))
Walter Benjamin · 1925 (submitted as habilitation thesis, rejected by the University of Frankfurt); 1928 (published commercially)
The Great Learning and Doctrine of the Mean
Confucius (Kongzi) · Originally chapters of the Book of Rites (Li Ji, c. 1st c. BC); elevated to the Four Books by Zhu Xi (1130-1200) in the Song dynasty
The Plague (Mid (between The Stranger and The Rebel))
Albert Camus · 1947
Brave New World (Mid (Huxley's breakthrough novel))
Aldous Huxley · 1932
The Need for Roots (Posthumous)
Simone Weil · 1943 (written for Free France in London in the months before Weil's death; published posthumously 1949)
Waiting for God (Posthumous)
Simone Weil · 1942 letters to Father Perrin; published posthumously 1950
Sanctorum Communio (Earliest (Bonhoeffer's dissertation at age 21))
Dietrich Bonhoeffer · 1927 (Bonhoeffer's doctoral dissertation, completed at age 21)
The Seven Storey Mountain (Early (Merton's breakthrough book; the spiritual autobiography of his conversion))
Thomas Merton · 1948
Hind Swaraj (Early (the founding text of Gandhi's mature political-philosophical vision))
Mohandas K. Gandhi · 1909 (written aboard the Kildonan Castle in ten days during the voyage from London to South Africa)
An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth (Late-mid (looking back over the formative years))
Mohandas K. Gandhi · 1925-29 (originally serialised in the weekly Navajivan; the chapters cover Gandhi's life through the early Indian campaigns up to 1921)
A Black Theology of Liberation (Early (the systematic founding text of the field))
James Cone · 1970 (the second of Cone's books and the systematic statement of the position announced in Black Theology and Black Power, 1969)
The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Late (Cone's major late book))
James Cone · 2011
The Idiot (Mid (after Crime and Punishment, before Demons and Karamazov))
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky · 1868-69 (serialised in The Russian Messenger)
The Fall (Late (Camus's last completed novel; the Nobel followed in 1957))
Albert Camus · 1956
Lectures on Aesthetics (Late (Berlin lectures))
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel · 1820s (delivered as lectures); 1835-38 (compiled and published posthumously by H. G. Hotho)
Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (Mature (the most comprehensive single-text statement of the system))
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel · 1817 (1st edition); 1827 (2nd edition); 1830 (3rd and definitive edition, in three volumes)
Liber Divinorum Operum (Late (the culmination of her visionary trilogy))
Hildegard of Bingen · 1163-73 (composed in the last decade of Hildegard's life, after the Scivias and the Liber Vitae Meritorum)
On Christian Doctrine (Mid-late (composed across three decades))
Augustine of Hippo · 397 (Books 1-3.25); 426-27 (Books 3.25-4, completed near the end of Augustine's life)
Practice in Christianity (Late (the last major pseudonymous work; preceding the attack on the Danish state church))
Søren Kierkegaard · 1850 (published under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus)
De Providentia (Late)
Lucius Annaeus Seneca · c. 64 AD (late in Seneca's life, shortly before his forced suicide)
Psychological Types (Mid (the major systematic work after his 1912-13 break with Freud))
Carl Gustav Jung · 1921
What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? (Mid (Douglass at the height of his oratorical powers))
Frederick Douglass · July 5, 1852 (delivered at Corinthian Hall, Rochester, NY, to the Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society)
The Waste Land (Mid (the canonical modernist poem))
Thomas Stearns Eliot · 1921 (during Eliot's nervous breakdown and convalescence in Switzerland); 1922 published (edited substantially by Ezra Pound)
Four Quartets (Late (Eliot's mature Anglo-Catholic period))
Thomas Stearns Eliot · 1936 (Burnt Norton); 1940 (East Coker); 1941 (The Dry Salvages); 1942 (Little Gidding); 1943 (collected publication)
Vita Nuova (Early (Dante's first major work))
Dante Alighieri · c. 1295
Convivio (Mid (early years of exile, preceding the Comedy))
Dante Alighieri · 1304-07 (composed during the early years of Dante's exile from Florence; unfinished — four of fifteen planned books completed)
The Sorrows of Young Werther (Early (the 25-year-old Goethe's breakthrough work))
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · 1774
The Power of the Powerless (Mid (Havel as principal Charter 77 dissident))
Václav Havel · 1978 (circulated in samizdat in Czechoslovakia)
Six Crises (Mid (pre-presidential, post-1960 defeat))
Richard M. Nixon · 1962 (after Nixon's 1960 presidential defeat to Kennedy)
Provincial Letters (Late)
Blaise Pascal · 1656-57
An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (Mid-late)
David Hume · 1751
Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous (Early)
George Berkeley · 1713
Playing in the Dark (Mid-late)
Toni Morrison · 1992 (William E. Massey Lectures at Harvard, 1990)
Zen and Japanese Culture (Late)
Daisetsu Teitarō Suzuki · 1959 (developed from his 1938 Zen Buddhism and Its Influence on Japanese Culture)
Creation and Fall (Early-mid)
Dietrich Bonhoeffer · 1932-33
Aké: The Years of Childhood (Mid)
Wole Soyinka · 1981
Psychology and Alchemy (Late)
Carl Gustav Jung · 1944
Peace with God (Early-mid)
William Franklin "Billy" Graham · 1953
Eudemian Ethics
Aristotle · c. 350 BC
Man's Search for Meaning (Mid-late)
Viktor E. Frankl · 1946 (German original); 1959 (English translation)
Island (Late)
Aldous Huxley · 1962
No Man Is an Island (Mid)
Thomas Merton · 1955
Anasakti Yoga: The Gita According to Gandhi (Mid-late)
Mohandas K. Gandhi · 1929-32 (translations and commentaries; collected as Anasakti Yoga 1930)
Letters to Olga (Mid (composed during Havel's 1979-83 imprisonment))
Václav Havel · 1979-83 (letters from prison)
Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary (Early)
Paul Ricoeur · 1950 (French; English 1966)
Time and Narrative (Late)
Paul Ricoeur · 1983-85 (3 vols; English 1984-88)
Oneself as Another (Late)
Paul Ricoeur · 1990 (French; English 1992)
Eclipse of Reason (Mid)
Max Horkheimer · 1947 (English original; German edition 1967)
Knowledge and Human Interests (Early)
Jürgen Habermas · 1968 (German; English 1971)
The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Mid)
Jürgen Habermas · 1985 (German; English 1987)
The Quest for Certainty (Late)
John Dewey · 1929 (Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh, 1928-29)
Foundations of Christian Faith (Late)
Karl Rahner · 1976 (German; English 1978)
The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics (Late)
Hans Urs von Balthasar · 1961-69 (Vol I-VII; English 1982-91)
Theology of Hope (Early)
Jürgen Moltmann · 1964 (German; English 1967)
The Politics of Jesus (Mid)
John Howard Yoder · 1972 (2nd edn 1994)
Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (Late)
Michael Polanyi · 1958 (Gifford Lectures 1951-52 at Aberdeen)
The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (Mid)
Ernst Cassirer · 1923-29 (Vol I 1923, II 1925, III 1929)
Being Given (Late)
Jean-Luc Marion · 1997 (French; English 2002)
The Essence of Manifestation (Early)
Michel Henry · 1963 (French; English 1973)
Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History (Late)
Jan Patočka · 1975 (Czech samizdat; revised; English 1996)
Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values (Mid)
Max Scheler · 1913-16 (Yearbook for Philosophy and Phenomenological Research)
The Mystery of Being (Late)
Gabriel Marcel · 1949-50 (Gifford Lectures at Aberdeen)
Philosophy (Mid)
Karl Jaspers · 1932 (3 vols; English 1969-71)
Philosophy of Existence (Late)
Karl Jaspers · 1938 (German; English 1971)
Itinerarium Mentis in Deum (The Mind's Road to God) (Mid)
St. Bonaventure (Giovanni di Fidanza) · 1259
Ordinatio (Late)
John Duns Scotus (the Subtle Doctor) · c. 1300
The Divine Names (De Divinis Nominibus) (Late)
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite · late 5th or early 6th century
The Life of Moses (De Vita Moysis) (Late)
St. Gregory of Nyssa · c. 390
Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Mid)
Catharine A. MacKinnon · 1989
Justice and the Politics of Difference (Mid)
Iris Marion Young · 1990
Foundations of the Science of Knowledge (Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre) (Early)
Johann Gottlieb Fichte · 1794-95
Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (Late)
Thomas Reid · 1785
On the Holy Spirit (De Spiritu Sancto) (Late)
St. Basil of Caesarea (the Great) · c. 375
Theological Orations (Orations 27-31) (Mid)
St. Gregory of Nazianzus (the Theologian) · 380
Ambigua to John (Ambigua ad Iohannem) (Late)
St. Maximus the Confessor · c. 628-30
Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith (De Fide Orthodoxa) (Late)
St. John of Damascus · c. 743
Oration on the Dignity of Man (Oratio de hominis dignitate) (Mid)
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola · 1486
Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence (Late)
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Samuel Clarke · 1715-16
Biographia Literaria (Mid)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge · 1817
Faust, Part Two (Faust: Der Tragödie zweiter Teil) (Late)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · 1832 (composed 1825-31; published posthumously)
The Construction of Social Reality (Late)
John R. Searle · 1995
Warranted Christian Belief (Late)
Alvin Plantinga · 2000
An Essay on Free Will (Mid)
Peter van Inwagen · 1983
On Bullshit (Late)
Harry G. Frankfurt · 1986 (Raritan); 2005 (book)
African Religions and Philosophy (Mid)
John S. Mbiti · 1969 (2nd edn 1990)
Philosophy of Liberation (Filosofía de la Liberación) (Mid)
Enrique Dussel · 1977
Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza (Mid)
Gloria Anzaldúa · 1987
Silent Spring (Late)
Rachel Carson · 1962
The Dream of the Earth (Late)
Thomas Berry · 1988
The Destiny of Man (O naznachenii cheloveka) (Mid)
Nikolai Berdyaev · 1931
Athens and Jerusalem (Athènes et Jérusalem) (Late)
Lev Shestov · 1938
The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (Essai sur la théologie mystique de l'Église d'Orient) (Mid)
Vladimir Lossky · 1944
Freedom of the Will (Late)
Jonathan Edwards · 1754
Orthodoxy (Mid)
G.K. Chesterton · 1908
Mere Christianity (Mid)
C.S. Lewis · 1952 (based on BBC radio talks 1941-44)
The Souls of Black Folk (Mid)
W.E.B. Du Bois · 1903
The Education of Henry Adams (Late)
Henry Adams · 1907 (private printing); 1918 (public)
Religion and Nothingness (Shūkyō to wa nani ka) (Mid)
Nishitani Keiji · 1961
Being Peace (Late)
Thich Nhat Hanh · 1987
Rerum Novarum (Late)
Pope Leo XIII · 1891 (15 May)
Laudato Si' (Late)
Pope Francis · 2015 (24 May)
Christ the Liberator: A View from the Victims (Late)
Jon Sobrino · 1999 (Spanish); 2001 (English)
God Is Red: A Native View of Religion (Late)
Vine Deloria Jr. · 1973 (2nd edn 1992; 3rd edn 2003)
Gulliver's Travels (Late)
Jonathan Swift · 1726
Swann's Way (Du côté de chez Swann) (Mid)
Marcel Proust · 1913
The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (Mid)
W.H. Auden · 1944-46 (composed); 1947 (published)
Autobiography of a Yogi (Late)
Paramahansa Yogananda · 1946
Escape from Freedom (Mid)
Erich Fromm · 1941
The Sociological Imagination (Mid)
C. Wright Mills · 1959
The Social Construction of Reality (Mid)
Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann · 1966
The Culture of Narcissism (Late)
Christopher Lasch · 1979
God in Search of Man (Late)
Abraham Joshua Heschel · 1955
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Late)
Jonathan Haidt · 2012
The Gulag Archipelago (Late)
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn · 1958-68 (composed); 1973-75 (published in Russian abroad)
If This Is a Man (Se questo è un uomo) (Mid)
Primo Levi · 1947 (rev. 1958)
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Late)
Naomi Klein · 2007
An Essay on the Principle of Population (Late)
Thomas Robert Malthus · 1798 (1st edn); 1803 (rev. 2nd edn)
The Methods of Ethics (Late)
Henry Sidgwick · 1874 (1st edn); 1907 (7th, definitive)
The Divine Relativity (Mid)
Charles Hartshorne · 1948 (Yale Terry Lectures 1947)
The Fragility of Goodness (Mature (the book that established Nussbaum as a major figure))
Martha Nussbaum · 1986 (Cambridge UP; revised 2001 with substantial new preface)
Upheavals of Thought (Late-mature (Nussbaum's magnum opus, eight years in the writing after the Gifford Lectures))
Martha Nussbaum · 2001 (Cambridge UP; based on the Gifford Lectures, Edinburgh, 1993)
On Violence (Late (Arendt's most-cited short political essay, written in response to the 1968 student movements))
Hannah Arendt · 1969 (New York Review of Books, Feb 27); 1970 (Harcourt expanded book edition)
On What Matters (Late (Parfit's final, three-decade-in-the-making work — his second after Reasons and Persons, 1984))
Derek Parfit · 2011 (Vols I & II, Oxford UP); 2017 (Vol III, Oxford UP — published months after Parfit's death)
De Officiis (Late (Cicero's last completed philosophical work, written in the months before his proscription and execution))
Marcus Tullius Cicero · 44 BC (composed at Tusculum, October-December 44 BC, in the months between Caesar's assassination and Cicero's own death in December 43 BC)
On Evil (Late (Aquinas's mature treatment of evil and the passions, parallel to the Summa))
Thomas Aquinas · 1269-72 (Paris, during Aquinas's second regency, contemporaneous with Summa Theologiae I-II)
The Vision of God (Mature (one of Cusa's most condensed and beautiful late works))
Nicholas of Cusa (Nicolaus Cusanus) · 1453 (composed for the Benedictine monks of Tegernsee, sent with an icon of an all-seeing face)
Anti-Pelagian writings (Late (Augustine's last great theological controversy, occupying the final two decades of his life))
Augustine of Hippo (Aurelius Augustinus) · 412-30 (the long anti-Pelagian controversy); peak works 426-29
Reden der Unterweisung (Early (Eckhart's first major vernacular work, written before the trials of his last decade))
Meister Eckhart (Eckhart von Hochheim) · c. 1294-98 (Eckhart's early period as Prior of Erfurt and Vicar of Thuringia, before the first Paris regency)
Vom Edlen Menschen (Mature (probably from the Strasbourg years before the trial))
Meister Eckhart (Eckhart von Hochheim) · c. 1308-13 (Strasbourg or Paris period)
Against Marcion (Mature (Tertullian's longest and most systematic work))
Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus · c. 207-12 (composed in three revisions; the third recension is the surviving text)
Against Praxeas (Late (composed in Tertullian's Montanist period but with orthodox Trinitarian content))
Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus · c. 213 (in Tertullian's Montanist period)
al-Kashf ʿan Manāhij al-Adilla (Mature)
Ibn Rushd (Averroes) · c. 1180
Jōdo Wasan (Late)
Shinran · 1248 (Shinran in his mid-seventies)
Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect (Early (Spinoza's first major philosophical project, left incomplete as the Ethics took shape))
Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza · c. 1661-62 (unfinished; published posthumously in the Opera Posthuma 1677)
Naturales Quaestiones (Late)
Lucius Annaeus Seneca · c. 62-64 CE (composed during Seneca's retirement)
De Otio (Late)
Lucius Annaeus Seneca · c. 62 CE (composed at the time of Seneca's retirement from Nero's court)
De Constantia Sapientis (Mid)
Lucius Annaeus Seneca · c. 56 CE (early in Seneca's tenure as Nero's advisor)
Othello (Mature)
William Shakespeare · c. 1603-04 (first performed Whitehall, 1 November 1604)
Essays: Second Series (Mature)
Ralph Waldo Emerson · 1844 (James Munroe & Co., Boston)
Translation of Plato's dialogues (Mature)
Friedrich Schleiermacher · 1804-28 (multi-volume translation with extensive prefaces and notes)
The Allegory of Love (Mature)
C. S. Lewis · 1936 (Oxford UP); Hawthornden Prize 1936
Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (Early)
Iris Murdoch · 1953 (Bowes & Bowes, Cambridge)
The Black Prince (Mature)
Iris Murdoch · 1973 (Chatto & Windus); James Tait Black Memorial Prize 1973
De Vulgari Eloquentia (Mid-mature)
Dante Alighieri · c. 1304-05 (two of four planned books)
The Descent of Man (Mature)
Charles Darwin · 1871 (John Murray, London); revised 1874
Principal Doctrines (Mature)
Epicurus · c. 300 BC
Notes of a Native Son (Mid-mature)
James Baldwin · 1955
Giovanni's Room (Mid-mature)
James Baldwin · 1956
Slavery and Freedom (Late-mature)
Nikolai Berdyaev · 1939 (in Russian; English 1944)
The Art of Happiness (Late)
Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama · 1998
Just As I Am (Late)
William Franklin "Billy" Graham · 1997
How to Be Born Again (Mid)
William Franklin "Billy" Graham · 1977
The Journey: How to Live by Faith in an Uncertain World (Late)
William Franklin "Billy" Graham · 2006
Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman (Late)
Mary Wollstonecraft · 1796-97 (composed, unfinished), 1798 (posthumous publication)
The Crisis of Western Philosophy (Early)
Vladimir Solovyov · 1874
Akal Ustat (Mature)
Guru Gobind Singh · c. 1696-1708
Dreams from My Father (Early)
Barack H. Obama · 1995
A Promised Land (Late)
Barack H. Obama · 2020
Words of Paradise (Kalimát-i-Firdawsiyyih) (Late)
Bahá'u'lláh (Mírzá Ḥusayn-ʻAlí Núrí) · c. 1890
Edition of Jerome (Mature)
Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam · 1516
Personas with Liberal Theology as a declared influence
How Liberal Theology resolves each dilemma
56 resolved positions across 4 dimensions, including 19 distinctive where the majority of schools go the other way · 1 unaligned.
Each dimension is sorted so minority positions come first. Mainstream positions are folded into an expandable list.
Time · 9 dilemmas · 3 distinctive
Persistence, the future, and the direction of becoming.
Distinctive · only 12% of schools agree
(24/202)
Is the universe running out of usable energy?
The heat death of the universe — entropy maxed out, no further work possible — is among the more sobering implications of mainstream physics. Whether it is structurally inescapable depends on what kind of finitude the cosmos has.
The cosmos has bounds; heat death is a real horizon.
On this view, time itself is finite — the universe had a beginning and will have an end. Heat death (or whatever the actual end-state turns out to be) is a real horizon, structurally implied by the kind of cosmos we live in.
Roads not taken
Time is unbounded but matter is finite; usable energy can fail without time failing. (47%) ·
Time both has and lacks bounds depending on the level you ask at; finitude is conventional. (26%) ·
Both time and matter are unbounded; 'running out' is misframed. (15%)
Distinctive · only 12% of schools agree
(24/202)
Are natural resources fundamentally finite, or only practically so?
Whether we can grow our way out of resource constraints — or whether the cosmos sets limits the economy ultimately must obey — depends on what kind of finitude matter has.
Resources are finite in the strict sense; living well requires accepting the limit.
On this view, the cosmos is bounded in both time and matter; resources are categorically not renewable beyond what cosmic processes provide. Practical limits and metaphysical limits coincide. Living well means living within limits, not engineering around them.
Roads not taken
Time goes on but matter is bounded; we are eventually constrained even with infinite time. (47%) ·
The finitude question is level-dependent; resource ethics happens at the level that constrains us. (26%) ·
Resources are practically inexhaustible on cosmic scales; terrestrial limits are engineering. (15%)
Distinctive · only 12% of schools agree
(24/202)
Could we owe future generations more than is materially possible to provide?
If we owe future people a habitable planet and the material means to flourish, and the cosmos is bounded in ways that make those obligations impossible at some scale, the obligation and the possibility come apart. Where they come apart turns on what kind of finitude we live in.
The cosmos is bounded; our obligations to future generations are bounded with it.
On this view, the cosmos has limits; the obligation to future people is real but cannot exceed what the limits allow. The categorical worry about owing the impossible doesn't arise: the limits bound the asking. Ethics within a created or bounded order is the only …
Roads not taken
Time is unbounded but matter is not; we can owe more across long time than the matter can provide. (47%) ·
The owing-and-possibility question is level-dependent; we owe what is appropriate at the level we act on. (26%) ·
Both time and matter are unbounded; we cannot in principle owe more than is possible. (15%)
6 mainstream positions
Do you really choose?
The future is open and you are a genuine origin of it.
69%
Are addicts responsible for their addiction?
The addict could have chosen otherwise — that's why recovery is real.
69%
Should we hold AI systems responsible for what they do?
An AI without a free will is not the kind of thing that can be responsible.
69%
How much weight do future people deserve?
Time arises from events or from a deeper substrate — the future is not yet.
32%
Is regret rational?
The past is not a thing now; regret is the present holding what is no longer.
32%
Do we owe extinct species something we cannot give them?
Past species no longer exist; what we owe is to the present and the future.
32%
Matter · 7 dilemmas · 5 distinctive
What stuff is — fundamental, relational, or appearance.
Distinctive · only 15% of schools agree
(30/202)
What is money?
The question of what money is — a measured store of real value, an agreed-on practice, a relational ledger of debts, or just a name we apply to many different things — sits behind every argument about inflation, cryptocurrency, debt, and the state.
Money is the ledger of obligations among real people.
On relational views, money is not a substance you have; it is a record of who owes whom what. Debts and credits are real because the relations they track are real — to kin, to community, to ancestors, to land. Money is the form this …
Roads not taken
Money is a real institution with intrinsic features. (54%) ·
Money is a social practice — its content is what we make it. (16%) ·
“Money” names a family of practices — the definition question is nominal. (8%)
Distinctive · only 15% of schools agree
(30/202)
What is a nation?
Whether a nation is a real moral community with intrinsic character, a constructed legal-political artifact, a web of kinship and shared history, an imagined community, or a conventional partition of a deeper unity — these are real ontological positions with sharply different political downstream.
A nation is the web of kinship, ancestry, and shared land that hosts a people.
On relational views, the nation is the relational fabric — extended kinship, ancestral inheritance, shared ecology, communal practice — that hosts a people across generations. Borders matter less than belonging; lineage and land carry the weight that political structures only ratify.
Roads not taken
A nation is a real moral community with intrinsic character. (54%) ·
A nation is a constructed polity — a project, not a discovery. (16%) ·
“Nation” names a family of practices imaginatively held together. (8%)
Distinctive · only 15% of schools agree
(30/202)
What makes someone male or female?
Whether sex is a real biological kind, a constructed social category, a relational identity, a label applied to varied phenomena, or a conventional distinction within a deeper unity is the ontological question the contemporary dispute about gender is mostly about.
Sex and gender are constituted by relations of recognition.
On relational views, identity is not a property a person has alone; it is constituted by the web of recognition the person sits in. What makes someone a man or a woman in any thick sense is the relations of kinship, community, ritual, and recognition …
Roads not taken
Sex is a real biological kind with given content. (54%) ·
Gender is constructed; what counts as male or female reflects practice. (16%) ·
“Male” and “female” are family-resemblance terms — no single essence. (8%)
Distinctive · only 15% of schools agree
(30/202)
Should we edit the human germline?
Whether human nature is a given biological kind, a constructed category, a relational achievement, a family-resemblance cluster, or a conventional distinction within deeper unity is the ontological question the policy debate over heritable gene editing is mostly about.
Personhood is constituted by relations of descent and kinship; germline editing reshapes the relational fabric.
On relational views, what makes someone a person is the web of kinship, ancestry, and community they sit in — not a property the body carries alone. Heritable editing intervenes in exactly this fabric: the lineage that ancestors handed on, the descent that descendants will …
Roads not taken
Human nature is a real biological kind given by reproductive biology or by creation; editing the germline transgresses what is given. (54%) ·
The categories we count as 'human' are emergent from practice; germline editing is a practice-revision like any other. (16%) ·
'Human nature' is a cluster term without a single essence; the editing question is empirical, not metaphysical. (8%)
Distinctive · only 16% of schools agree
(33/202)
Is the world created from nothing?
Creatio ex nihilo is one of the most distinctive Western-theological claims. Whether matter was created from nothing, eternally exists, or is sustained moment-by-moment turns on what kind of thing matter is.
Matter is constituted by relations; the question of 'from what?' presupposes substance.
On this view, matter is not a stuff but a patterning — the standing relations among things, ancestors, processes, and places. The creatio-ex-nihilo question doesn't quite arise, because the ontology has no slot for a free-standing substance to be created or eternal. What persists is …
Roads not taken
Yes — matter was created and is conserved as a real substance. (55%) ·
Matter is real but emerges from something deeper — neither bedrock nor created-from-nothing. (23%) ·
Matter arises and dissolves through cosmic rounds; neither created from nothing nor eternal. (4%)
Observer · 37 dilemmas · 5 distinctive
Mind, agency, and the knower's relation to the known.
Distinctive · only 10% of schools agree
(21/202)
What kind of religious-theological authority does the tradition recognize?
Religious traditions differ not only in what they believe, but in how authority is structured — and what counts as the right kind of argument.
Historical-critical method is the authority.
Religious claims are evaluated by the same critical-historical standards as any other claim.
Roads not taken
The category does not apply — the school is non-religious. (44%) ·
Direct experiential union is the authority. (16%) ·
Institutional teaching tradition is the authority. (14%)
Distinctive · only 15% of schools agree
(30/202)
When does a person begin?
The political question of abortion sits atop an older ontological one: at what point does there exist a someone — a being with moral standing — rather than merely the materials from which one will form?
Personhood is conferred by being-in-relation.
On relational views, person was never the name of a thing that exists on its own — it is the name of a node in a web of recognition, obligation, kinship, and ecology. The question of when a being becomes a person is the question …
Roads not taken
A person exists from conception — when a new being comes into existence. (54%) ·
A person comes into being gradually, as the capacities of a mind develop. (16%) ·
The question presupposes a fact of the matter that isn’t there. (8%)
Distinctive · only 15% of schools agree
(30/202)
What is marriage?
Behind every disagreement about how marriage should be defined is a prior disagreement about what kind of thing it is — a given order to be recognized, a practice to be negotiated, or a web of relations to be woven.
Marriage is constituted by the web of relations it creates.
On relational views, marriage is not a thing in itself but a node in a web — a configuration of obligations to children, extended kin, ancestors, ecology, and community. Its definition is what the network of relations is, and any attempt to specify it apart …
Roads not taken
Marriage has a given form — it’s a kind of thing we recognize, not make. (54%) ·
Marriage is a practice we shape — its content is what we make it. (16%) ·
“Marriage” names a family of practices — the definition question is nominal. (8%)
Distinctive · only 15% of schools agree
(30/202)
What is our place in nature?
Whether humans are masters of nature, members of nature, or makers of nature is not a question climate science can settle. It depends on what nature is, what we are, and what kind of relationship is possible between us.
Embedded in a web — partners with the more-than-human world.
On these views, humans were never outside nature, and the question of our 'place in' it is the question of how to live within the relations that already constitute us. Plants, animals, rivers, ancestors, descendants are not resources or stage scenery; they are kin and …
Roads not taken
Active in a real nature — we cultivate, steward, transform. (48%) ·
Nature is partly what we make of it — concepts, practices, and minds shape the world. (15%) ·
Subject to a real natural order we did not make. (12%)
Distinctive · only 15% of schools agree
(30/202)
Should we colonize space?
The drive to extend human presence beyond Earth is sometimes framed as the next chapter of stewardship, sometimes as hubris, sometimes as escape from problems we ought to solve here. Which it is depends on what we take our relationship to nature to be.
Colonisation continues the work that ended the wisdom of seven-generation thinking.
On relational views, space colonisation is the abstract endpoint of the same pattern that produced ecological crisis on Earth: humans treating themselves as separate from the more-than-human world they are actually inside. To go to Mars in the spirit of leaving Earth is to leave …
Roads not taken
Cultivating worlds beyond Earth is the next form of stewardship. (48%) ·
The 'space frontier' is partly what we make of it. (15%) ·
Nature includes its limits; colonisation is bounded by what the cosmos allows. (12%)
31 mainstream positions
Is genetic engineering of food stewardship or domination?
Editing the genome cuts into the relational fabric; we should be very slow.
15%
Is truth universal, tradition-bound, situated, or constructed?
Truth is real but always known from a perspective.
16%
What happens to "you" when you die?
You were always a pattern. The pattern propagates.
18%
Does history have a direction or meaning?
History is the gradual unfolding of improvement or liberation.
23%
Could causation work backwards?
Causation runs one way — the arrow of time is real and structural.
68%
Is the asymmetry between memory and anticipation a real feature of time, or just of us?
The asymmetry is real because time itself has a real direction.
68%
Is the arrow of time a real feature of the cosmos, or only of how we describe it?
The arrow is real and structural; the asymmetry isn't an artifact of description.
68%
Is environmental damage ever truly permanent?
Damage is real and permanent on the relevant timescales. There is no recovery; there is only limitation.
66%
Can a civilization recover from collapse?
Civilizational complexity is hard to build and easy to lose; recovery is at best partial.
66%
Does the second law of thermodynamics mean something morally?
Entropy is what time is. The moral weight, if any, is the weight of working against the current.
66%
Is reality fundamentally digital?
No — continuous divine sustaining act, the Tao that knows no joints, the One's self-disclosure.
44%
Are there indivisible units of experience?
No — continuous divine presence; consciousness is the unbroken witness.
44%
Is memory stored or reconstructed?
Held in continuous divine or ancestral remembering — neither stored discretely nor purely reconstructed.
44%
Can prayer for someone far away affect them?
Prayer reaches because God or a cosmic ordering acts on the prayed-for.
37%
Are coincidences ever more than coincidence?
What looks like coincidence is providence — there is no such thing as a real coincidence.
37%
Are the dead morally present to the living?
The dead are present through divine memory, communion of saints, or ancestor presence.
35%
Is divine omniscience compatible with human freedom?
The human observer is in time, but God's vantage is not — and foreknowledge is not foreordering.
33%
Does meditation reveal something genuinely timeless?
Meditation participates in a real eternity — divine or cosmic — that the bounded human observer ordinarily cannot reach.
33%
Does prayer change God's mind?
God sees from outside time; prayer doesn't change God's mind, but it is part of how providence is enacted.
33%
What makes someone the same person over time?
You are a soul — what persists through change is the non-bodily aspect.
29%
Is the late-stage dementia patient still the person their spouse married?
The soul persists; the cognitive change is the body's, not the person's.
29%
If a teleporter copied and destroyed you, would you have survived?
The soul accompanies the person; engineering can't transfer it.
29%
Does environmental harm in another country bind me morally?
Distance doesn't dilute obligation; communion of saints / divine relation spans the cosmos.
29%
Who is the moral primary — the individual, the community, the cosmos, the class, or the species?
The community of persons is the moral primary.
28%
Should we trust expert testimony when we can't verify it?
Trust expertise only insofar as it coheres with first-person experience.
17%
Is religious revelation a real source of knowledge?
What gets called 'revelation' is real direct experience — not a text.
17%
Does an LLM 'know' the things it correctly produces?
An LLM has no first-person experience, so no knowing in the relevant sense.
17%
Could an AI have a mind that matters?
An AI’s standing is constituted by the relations it enters.
15%
How is knowledge of reality produced?
Through historical-critical engagement and the working-out of contradictions.
13%
Do animals have moral standing comparable to humans?
An animal's standing is constituted by its place in the relational fabric.
11%
Could a fetal brain organoid in a petri dish be conscious?
The organoid's standing is constituted by the relations of care around its production.
11%
Information · 4 dilemmas, all mainstream
Is anything truly lost when someone forgets?
Information is conserved — the personal pattern is held even when an individual mind loses it.
39%
Does deleting your data online destroy something real?
Information at the cosmic level isn't destroyed; deletion only obscures access.
39%
Could the dead, in principle, be brought back?
The information that constitutes a person is conserved; restoration is in principle possible.
39%
Is forgiveness ontologically possible?
The offense persists ontologically; forgiveness is real moral work, but it doesn't erase what was.
39%
Jump to school (202)
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