REASON, RELIGION, AND THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

A major characteristic of much of religion in the modern world is that it lags behind emerging scientific understanding of the nature of existence and the nature of the universe. The great world religions, which have much of value to say to the modern world, are often locked into cosmologies that seemed true in past centuries, but seem out of sync with the twenty-first century. The author of this volume of sermons, who considers himself to be a naturalist, a rationalist and a humanist, has taken as a mantra for his sermons a sentence from John Locke: "One unerring mark of the love of truth is not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built upon will warrant." The eighteen sermons in this volume cover a wide variety of topics, but each one of them is presented from the perspective that religious understanding in this century needs to honestly square with contemporary knowledge about the nature of the universe

.Ronald Knapp, who holds degrees from Central Michigan University, Drew University and Dartmouth, has been in the ministry for more than half a century and is, in retirement, minister emeritus of First Unitarian Church of Omaha, Nebraska. Rev. Knapp, who continues to preach in churches throughout the Midwest, is also the author of

Of Life Immense: The Prophetic Vison of Walt Whitman, published by Outskirts Press