Consequences of Lutheranism: James and Rorty on the Sacred

Abstract

The primary object of this article is to analyze how William James and Richard Rorty conceive the sacred. The latter explicitly follows in his philosophy of religion a Jamesian path, which stresses the importance of privatizing religion. I will put forward two arguments against this interpretation: first, that James’s notion of self-surrender is incompatible with the Rortyan idea of privatization; second, that this notion of self-surrender has Lutheran roots in James’s Varieties of Religious Experience.