Wesley Wildman's blog

[Alex]

Wesley Wildman's Home Page
http://www.wesleywildman.com
from unambiguous nothing to ambiguous something and relentlessly, gracefully back again

About Wesley Wildman

Academic

I teach philosophy, theology, religion, and ethics at Boston University in the United States. I direct Boston University’s unique religion and science PhD program. I also work in the religious thought program within Boston University’s graduate school, and a variety of graduate degree programs in Boston University’s School of Theology. With Patrick McNamara, I founded the Institute for the Bio-Cultural Study of Religion, a research institute dedicated to the scientific study of religion. I participate in numerous research projects related to the study of religion using the sciences of cognition and culture.

Outreach

One of my outreach programs is the Liberal Evangelical Project. This project aims to empower Christians who see themselves as intentional moderates and to offer resources to Christian congregations who intend to be both Christ-centered and creatively inclusive. These Christians and congregations have both liberal and evangelical instincts, they find polarized political and religious debates alienating, and they are inspired by Jesus’ example of radical inclusiveness and by his preaching of a love that transcends ideological and theological divisions. Resources are collected at LiberalEvangelical.org, including news articles and Dr. Brandon Daniel-Hughes’ perceptive and eccentric Le Blog.


Wikipedia: Wesley Wildman
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wesley_Wildman

Wildman’s work initially focused on one religious tradition, Christianity, especially its beliefs. His first book, Fidelity with Plausibility (1998), analyzed the plausibility of central Christian beliefs in the context of the contemporary physical and human sciences and the history of encounter with the other religions.[3] Since then, Wildman’s philosophical and theological goals have broadened as he has attempted to interpret religion as a social, cultural, and evolutionary phenomenon. This broadening has included a longstanding interest in the comparative study of world religious traditions and involvement in a series of publications on interdisciplinary methodology and practice spanning the humanities and sciences as they relate to religion.[4]

Many of Wildman’s works have explored the subject of religious naturalism, or religious responses to naturalistic conceptions of reality. This line of research has included critiques of anthropomorphic conceptions of ultimate reality and the ongoing attempt to frame ideas of ultimate reality naturalistically—that is, without recourse to non-embodied awareness or supernatural agency in God or in any other realm of reality. A related line of inquiry in Wildman’s corpus investigates the biological, cultural, and evolutionary mechanisms whereby human beings generate supernaturalistic conceptions of ultimate reality.[5]

Wildman has sought to rescue philosophy of religion from what he has described as its religiously parochial character by redefining it as a field of multidisciplinary, comparative inquiries rooted in secular academic institutions. Along with neurologist Patrick McNamara, also at Boston University, Wildman founded the Institute for the Biocultural Study of Religion, an independent scientific research institute that pursues research and public outreach on the scientific study of religious phenomena.[6] In 2011, the Institute began publication of Religion, Brain, & Behavior, a peer-reviewed academic journal whose advisory board includes such figures as philosopher Daniel Dennett, religion scholar Ann Taves, sociologist of religion Nancy Ammerman, and many of the leading figures in the scientific study of religion and the cognitive science of religion.[7]