Abstract: The philosophy of religion as a distinct discipline is an innovation of the last 200 years, but its central topics—the existence and nature of the divine, humankind’s relation to it, the nature of religion, and the place of religion in human life—have been with us since the inception of philosophy. Philosophers have long critically examined the truth of and rational justification for religious claims, and have explored such philosophically interesting phenomena as faith, religious experience, and the distinctive features of religious discourse. The second half of the twentieth century was an especially fruitful period, with philosophers using new developments in logic and epistemology to mount both sophisticated defenses of, and attacks on, religious claims. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Religion contains newly commissioned chapters by twenty-one prominent experts who cover the field in a comprehensive but accessible manner. Each chapter is expository, critical, and representative of a distinctive viewpoint. The Handbook is divided into two parts. The first, “Problems,” covers the most frequently discussed topics, among them arguments for God’s existence, the nature of God’s attributes, religious pluralism, the problem of evil, and religious epistemology. The second, “Approaches,” contains four essays assessing the advantages and disadvantages of different methods of practicing philosophy of religion—analytic, Wittgensteinian, continental, and feminist.

Keywords: Analytic (philosophy of religion), arguments for God’s existence, existence and nature of the divine, continental (philosophy of religion), faith, feminist (philosophy of religion), God’s attributes, methods of practicing philosophy of religion, nature of religion, philosophy of religion, problem of evil, religion’s place in human lives, religious claims, religious discourse, religious epistemology, religious pluralism, truth and justification of religious claims, Wittgensteinian (philosophy of religion)