Philosophy of Religion

Religion in the Making

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Alfred North Whitehead

1926

Delivered as the Lowell Lectures at King's Chapel, Boston, Religion in the Making is Whitehead's philosophical account of what religion fundamentally is and what it requires. He argues that religion at its core is not primarily communal or ritualistic but solitary: the encounter of an individual with the universe in its deepest character. In these lectures he develops an early version of his dipolar theology — God as both the ground of eternal forms and a living reality shaped by the world's experience — and insists that religion must be as rigorous and self-correcting as science if it is to survive modernity.