On the Meaning of Human Being

A brilliant and highly original examination of the difficult question of how we might think intelligently about religious claims in the modern world.

Richard Oxenberg provides a valuable account of how reason and religion have come to seem ever more distant and opposed to one another over the course of modernity, and argues that an unexpected rapprochement between them can be found in the phenomenological method developed by Martin Heidegger in his epochal work, Being and Time.

Addressing itself to both scholar and layperson, On the Meaning of Human Being opens up Heidegger's thought in Being and Time with an expert reading of the work. It then applies that reading to an interpretation of the Bible, leading to new points of access to the way in which religion addresses fundamental human questions, and also to new insight into difficulties with Heidegger's own existential analysis.

A deep consideration of the interface between modernity and religion, On the Meaning of Human Being will interest anyone who is concerned with issues of reason and revelation.