WHAT IS RELIGION?

This posthumous volume by the noted Protestant theologian, Paul Tillich, contains three long essays written in 1919, 1922, and 1925. They are not, however, samples of a ""younger Tillich,"" but embody in earlier form themes that he was to develop and elaborate through more than forty years of teaching and writing. The subject matter and the method of a philosophy of religion is the central focus of these essays. Tillich used ""religion"" in both a negative and a positive way, seeing it as something true faith should enable the person to escape, and yet also as an aid to his full maturing in faith. The philosophy of religion serves as a ""normative cultural science,"" showing the importance of the concept of meaning for understanding the relation between religion and culture -- a relationship which Tillich more than almost any thinker of our time brought into prominence. Readers of Tillich's other works will find here many concepts already familiar. The book is valuable, however, in bringing together these early essays in a way that reveals the quality of his early thinking.