inspiration and encouragement needed for sustaining humanity in a postreligious world. Theologians who insist on the essential vanity of human accomplishments hardly have anything more promising to offer. Forswearing confidence in the Divine and the human: what dismal prescriptions these are for creatures trying to maintain the conviction that life is meaningful and worth living.
What then is to be believed? Practical reflections having brought us back to theoretical ones, it would appear that the most important thing to be done is to settle upon a sound world view. In a free and pluralistic society, we can expect there to be ample disagreement as to what might qualify as a sound world view. Commitment to such a world view will inevitably be a matter of personal faith, involving many subjective factors. Still, we do not have to create a world view from scratch, for we have any number of sublime cultural products to take up, some authentically inspired. These tools for building a faith may help to save us yet, from determinism, pessimism, hopelessness, and cynicism. As we apply them, work with them, and integrate them into our experience and understanding and way of life, we may be awed not only by the grace that they have brought to our lives but by the even more imposing grace represented by the freedom and creativity of those who have participated in their development and transmission as well as by the freedom and creativity that we ourselves have been able to bring to their utilization, adaptation, and enhancement. Some of us will come to believe, with Emerson, that "there is a divine Providence in the world, which will not save us but through our own cooperation."66
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