Faith and understanding: late twentieth-century autobiographical conversion narratives by British and American philosophers

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe article introduces and critically explores a series of autobiographical texts produced in the early 1990s by world-famous British and American philosophers depicting their personal journeys towards discovering or rediscovering religious faith. The analysis is developed into two sections: first, it identifies a series of major aspects on which contemporary philosophical and theological debates on narrative theory converge; second, it shows how the theoretical aspects of the conversion narrative (the conversion of life into text, the conversion of a philosopher to religious faith, the conversion of the believer, understood as the appropriation of his/her life by an entire community as yet another example of communal practice, and ultimately, the conversion of the entire community to the philosophical ideals preached by the new convert) pose philosophical challenges to each author.