Donald A. Crosby
| Religious Naturalism | |
|---|---|
Donald Crosby, PhD
|
|
| Fields | Ancient Philosophy, 17th and 18th Century Philosophy, American Philosophy, Philosophy of Nature, Metaphysics, Existentialism, Philosophy of Religion |
| Institutions |
2002 - Florida State University 1965-2001 Colorado State University 1962-1965 Centre College |
| Alma mater |
PhD - Columbia University, 1963 ThM - Princeton Theological Seminary, 1959 BD -Princeton Theological Seminar, 1956 BA - Davidson College, 1953 |
| Known for | religious naturalism |
| Influences | John Dewey, Paul Tillich, William James, Alfred North Whitehead, |
| Notable awards | see text |
2002 - Florida State University 1965-2001 Colorado State University
PhD - Columbia University, 1963 ThM - Princeton Theological Seminary, 1959 BD -Princeton Theological Seminar, 1956
Donald Allen Crosby is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Colorado State University, since January 2009. Crosby's interests focus on metaphysics, American pragmatism, philosophy of nature, existentialism, and philosophy of religion. He is a member of the Highlands Institute of American Religious and Philosophical Thought (HAIRPT) and has been a leader in the discussions on Religious Naturalism.
Crosby is a Religious Naturalist having contributed to the movement with six books and a number of journal articles and chapters in books. He argues that nature itself, without notions of God, gods, animating spirits, or supernatural beings or realms of any kind, is both metaphysically and religiously ultimate, and thus an appropriate and compelling focus of religious commitment and concern. Nature as a whole can be considered sacred. This is so despite the radical ambiguities of nature, or its intricate mixtures of goods and evils, to which he calls sustained attention in his 2008 book Living with Ambiguity: Religious Naturalism and the Menace of Evil.
He was born in Mansfield, Ohio, and grew up in Pensacola, Florida. He attended Davidson College in North Carolina and trained for the Presbyterian ministry at Princeton Theological Seminary. He was minister of a Presbyterian church in Christiana, Delaware, for three years and decided after that time to study for a doctorate in religion, with emphasis on philosophy of religion and ethics, in the joint program in religion at Union Theological Seminary and Columbia University in New York City. During the first two years of his doctoral work he served as part-time assistant minister at the First Congregational Church on the Green in Norwalk, Connecticut. Following upon his doctoral studies, he became an assistant professor of philosophy and religion at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky. In the fall of 1965 he began teaching religious studies and philosophy in the philosophy department at Colorado State University, from which he retired as Emeritus Professor of Philosophy in 2001.
Crosby demitted the Presbyterian ministry in 1969 and began to develop his version of religious naturalism in writings dating from the early 1990s, reaching fuller expression in A Religion of Nature in 2002, and continuing to the present. Impetus for this process of development also dates from the writing of his book on philosophical nihilism, The Specter of the Absurd, published in 1988 and from his study of, and constructive work on, theories of religion in Interpretive Theories of Religion, published in 1981. The writing of his doctoral dissertation on Horace Bushnell’s theory of language, published in 1975 as Horace Bushnell’s Theory of Language in the Context of Other Nineteenth Century Philosophies of Language, contributed greatly to the freeing of his mind from any vestiges of biblical or theological literalism, as did his studies of the origins and characters of the Hebrew and Jewish scriptures at Princeton.
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