Document Type
Article - post-print
Publication Date
2018
Abstract
What are the demands of religious inquiry? It can be tempting to think of these demands in strictly epistemic terms, e.g. as a function of the inquirer's background beliefs, cognitive faculties, natural cognitive ability, intellectual skills, and intellectual character. In this article, I extrapolate an alternative model of religious inquiry from three stories by the Southern Gothic writer Flannery O'Connor (1925–1964). According to the model, a person's fitness for religious inquiry also depends on whether she possesses a certain moral posture. In particular, I argue that something like moral humility functions as an epistemic virtue in the theistic domain.
Digital Commons @ LMU & LLS Citation
Baehr, J. (2020). Flannery O’Connor and religious epistemology. Religious Studies, 56(3), 349–369. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0034412518000562