The author analyses the specifics of religious consciousness in the post-secular socio-cultural space. The main focus is the study of the nature and dynamics of spirituality in the Post-Soviet Russian society, clarifying the semantic contents of the dichotomous variables “believer - non-believer", “religious - non-religious", and explaining the functioning of these concepts in the mass religious consciousness. Based on the extensive material of sociological studies conducted in Russia over the past decades, the author attempts to identify covert processes that affect the results of religious identification. Among the main features of the modern religious mass consciousness are the following: external nature of spirituality, ethno-confessional reductionism, eclecticism of religious beliefs, magical perception of the sacred, virtualization of religion, religious intolerance, as a result of predominance of the first-generation believers.

The author applies reformed epistemology supplemented by some ideas from evolutionary cognitive science to consider the problem of justification of belief in the God of revelation. He argues that since our cognitive faculties are the result of evolution by natural selection, we have strong reasons for supposing that those spheres of reality which bore neither direct nor indirect relations to the survival needs of our ancestors lie outside our natural knowledge. If there is a certain mighty and benevolent agent, that is, God, which belongs to this unknowable reality, we can expect that he would not leave us ignorant of his existence, even if we are not able to learn about him by ourselves. It could be supposed that God, in order to make us believe in Him, uses the conjunctions of natural circumstances foreseen by Him, in addition to the revelation given in a supernatural way. Therefore, if God exists and one believes in Him, one's religious belief is a product of reliable belief-forming processes installed by God. So, this belief could be regarded as warranted even without appropriate evidences.

This paper briefly surveys the intellectual context of the lecture “The Office of Justifying Faith" by John Henry Newman. Newman is an outstanding English theologian, writer and philosopher, who had a great influence on the development of the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches in the 19th and 20th centuries. Newman became one of the leaders of the so-called Tractarian Movement. Tractarians offered a radically new understanding of the relation between the Anglican Church and other ecumenical churches. The most famous expression of this rethinking was the branch theory. According to this theory, the Anglican Church is one of the three branches of a single universal Church alongside the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches. According to the Newman's doctrine of via media, Anglican Church represents the middle way between Roman Catholic Church and Protestant Churches. In the “Lectures on Justification" published in 1838, Newman applies the doctrine of via media to the set of problems that concern the Christian idea of justification. The lecture “The Office of Justifying Faith" is in this sense a very characteristic example of the doctrine of via media. Here Newman demonstrates the difference between the doctrines of the Anglican Church about the relationship between justification and faith and the doctrine of the Protestants about justification by faith only.

This work is a review of the book by Stephen T. Davis “God, Reason, and Theistic Proofs". The author discusses some methodological, logical and ontological advantages and disadvantages of this book as well as some features related to the translation of the book into Russian. The analysis is presented here not in chronological (chapter by chapter), but in a thematic order that enables the reader to get quickly acquainted with topics and problems considered in the book.

“Lectures on Justification" were read by John Henry Newman, one of the leaders of the Tractarian movement, in 1837 in Oxford, and then published in 1838. This series of lectures exemplifies Newman's doctrine of the “via media" of the Anglican Church. According to this doctrine, Anglican Church is supposed to pass between the extremes of papism and popular Protestantism. The tenth lecture examines the relationship between faith and justification. The author criticizes the popular Protestant doctrine of justification by faith only that neglects the office of sacraments in salvation. He suggests the interpretation of faith as one of the instruments of justification, which justifies only after and not before the baptism.

This is a review of the fifth issue of the international almanac “Philosophy of Religion", prepared by the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences with the support of the Society of Christian Philosophers. The texts composing almanac are evaluated from criteria of their originality, informativeness, scientific novelty and justifyability. The reviewer seeks to be unprejudiced, paying attention both to the merits of the philosophical and theological positions presented in the text, and to imperfections, which are generated by objective and subjective conditions.