This essay is in the philosophy of Christian liturgy. Specifically, it explores the liturgical practice, at home in the Eastern Orthodox Church, of venerating icons, asking: What is it about the liturgical role of icons that would make behavior such as touching and kissing them appropriate? After arguing that the standard answers to this question offered by Western and Eastern Christians are inadequate, I develop an account according to which the icons are instruments of divine action. More exactly, I claim that they are vehicles of divine discourse. The behavior exhibited toward icons on the part of Eastern Christians, I maintain, makes excellent sense on the assumption that they are responses to speech acts performed by God by way of God’s appropriating the art of the church.

The main conclusion of the paper is that the prospects for a successful Free Will Defence employing Alvin Plantinga’s basic strategy are poor.

This paper affirms the thesis that Kierkegaard can be properly and profitably read in light of the virtue tradition, broadly construed. I consider several objections to this thesis, including the idea that Kierkegaard largely opposes the culture of antiquity out of which the virtue tradition comes, that Kierkegaard’s emphasis on duty and the commanded nature of love is incompatible with genuine concerns of virtue ethics, and that Kierkegaard’s concept of faith is incompatible with a strong concern for the virtues. Then I offer two avenues for broadening our thinking about his ethical philosophy in light of the attention he pays to the virtues. First, I argue that we may beneficially read Kierkegaard alongside Jane Austen, as someone whose writings reflect both the Christian and Aristotelian traditions. Second, in terms of contemporary moral philosophy, I suggest that Kierkegaard be placed in conversation with “radical virtue ethics,” a category recently introduced by David Solomon.

Reformed epistemology and cognitive science have remarkably converged on belief in God. Reformed epistemology holds that belief in God is basic—that is, belief in God is a natural, non-inferential belief that is immediately produced by a cognitive faculty. Cognitive science of religion also holds that belief in gods is (often) non-reflectively and instinctively produced—that is, non-inferentially and automatically produced by a cognitive faculty or system. But there are differences. In this paper, we will show some remarkable points of convergence, and a few points of divergence, between Reformed epistemology and the cognitive science of religion.

I defend a simple argument for why considerations of epistemic probability should lead us away from Open Future views according to which claims about the future are never true.

Alexander Pruss’s recent argument against the open future view (OF) is unsound. Contra Pruss, there is no conflict between OF, which holds that there are no true future contingent propositions (FCPs), and the high credence we place in some FCPs. When due attention is paid to the semantics of FCPs, to the relation of epistemic to objective probabilities, and to the distinction between truth simpliciter and truth at a time, it becomes clear that what we have good reason for believing is not that some FCPs are true, but rather that some FCPs have a good chance of becoming true.

John Turri claims to have refuted the main argument of William Alston’s Perceiving God. He contests Alston’s claim that “for any established doxastic practice it is rational to suppose that it is reliable.” I show that Turri has misinterpreted Alston at several key points, and that his refutation of Alston’s argument fails.

The aim of this paper is to throw light on Kierkegaard’s neglected distinction between love and its works, and by doing so to resolve the ambivalence in his position with regard to preferential love in Works of Love. In this text Kierkegaard seems to fail to reconcile his insistence on neighbourly love’s demand for equality and self-denial, with his wish to affirm the centrality of preferential love to human existence. My claim is that neighbourly love and preferential love are two distinct works of love that share the double structure of faith. This paradoxical structure, presented and discussed by Kierkegaard in Fear and Trembling, allows the two loves to be realized together, without requiring any compromise regarding their respective demands.