I know what you’re saying about Dewey and awe. I get the sense that Dewey himself had that sense of awe when he looked at the network of complex relationships and possibilities that make up the world of experience, but not everyone is going to feel that way - not even every pragmatist, which is probably where William James comes into the picture. Finding some way to thread James’ needle - to hold a belief in some kind of supernatural world while not conradicting any belief in the natural world - is a difficult feat in itself.

What Dewey’s notion doesn’t have, though, is a sense of teleology, a notion that things are happening for a reason and that there’s a higher purpose that it all fits into. (Obama called it the need for a narrative structure in that speech he gave last week.) The indeterminancy of nature is central to Dewey, and I imagine that’s why many people don’t find the comfort in Dewey’s vision that I do. I don’t know how to get an adult with an established world view to give up the security that comes with his or her world view, even though I see the value of trying. But I have a hunch that this is one of the reasons Dewey was so concerned with education.

Religion should be seen as one of the humanities, akin to an art. Religion is a “meaning-maker” that for thousands of years has been mis-apprehended as a “truth-spring”, a source of empirical truth. The problem with religion a…

I think that the key aspect of religion missing from Dewey’s estimation is the experiential facet of “awe”, or what cognitive sciences think of as the ‘religious experience.’ It is a kind of consumatory experience (a finality, or end-in-itself) that when undergone seems to exceede the consumation of all other meanings. The difficulty is to get the religious to step outside of their experience of “awe” or “spirit” to see how and why their brains are functioning in that way. I agree with Colin McGinn that the world is as much (if not more so) wondrous after God as with God; and I also think that making the leap from the dogmatic and ‘mysterious’ meanings of old-style religion to new more rational types of religion that take into account both the obdurate world and our intensely pluralistic social world as we live it *now* to be of utmost importance.