Edgar Sheffield Brightman 1884 – 1953
Edgar Sheffield Brightman was an American philosopher of religion and the leading second-generation representative of Boston Personalism. A pupil of Borden Parker Bowne, he held the Borden Parker Bowne chair at Boston University for the rest of his life and taught generations of students, including the young Martin Luther King Jr. His Philosophy of Religion, A Philosophy of Ideals, and Person and Reality developed an original personalist philosophy in which God is conceived as a finite supreme person whose own life contains a recalcitrant given in the face of which moral and religious progress are real.
Key facts
- Nationality
- American
- Era
- Contemporary
- Movements
- Continental
Selected quotes
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Attributed to Edgar Sheffield Brightman:
“God is finite in power but infinite in love.”
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Attributed to Edgar Sheffield Brightman:
“Personality is the supreme value and the supreme reality.”
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Attributed to Edgar Sheffield Brightman:
“Evil is the genuine surd in the divine experience.”
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Attributed to Edgar Sheffield Brightman:
“Religion at its best is the cooperation with God for ideal values.”
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Attributed to Edgar Sheffield Brightman:
“Every theology of an unlimited God collapses before the fact of evil.”