Miracles: An Exercise in Comparative Philosophy of Religion

Karen R. Zwier holds a Ph.D. in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Pittsburgh. Her academic work is largely concerned with questions about how—and if—metaphysical claims are engaged by empirical scientific methods. She formerly held faculty positions at Drake University and Iowa State University but has since changed careers and currently works as a software developer.David L. Weddle (Ph.D., Harvard) is Professor Emeritus of Religion at Colorado College, where he chaired the department and taught courses in philosophy of religion, ethics, comparative religious studies, and American religions. In addition to articles in scholarly journals, he is the author of Miracles: Wonder and Meaning in World Religions (2010) and Sacrifice in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (2017). He is active in community education and, while teaching at Cornell College, he was the moderator for a weekly television program called “Ethical Perspectives on the News.” His published essays discuss the role of religion in American politics.Timothy Knepper is Professor of Philosophy at Drake University, where he directs The Comparison Project, a public program in global, comparative religion and local, lived religion. He is the author of books on the future of the philosophy of religion (The Ends of Philosophy of Religion, Palgrave, 2013) and the sixth-century Christian mystic known as Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (Negating Negation, Wipf & Stock, 2014), as well as a forthcoming textbook on “global-critical philosophy of religion” (Philosophies of Religion, Bloomsbury, 2022). He is the editor of student-written, photo-narratives about religion in Des Moines (A Spectrum of Faith, Drake Community Press, 2017) and Beijing (Religions of Beijing, Bloomsbury, 2020), as well as The Comparison Project’s lecture and dialogue series on ineffability (Ineffability: An Exercise in Comparative Philosophy of Religion, Springer, 2017) and death and dying (Death and Dying: An Exercise in Comparative Philosophy of Religion, Springer, 2019).

• Chapter 1: Introduction.- Part I: Miracles in Religious Traditions.- Chapter 2: How to Tell a Miracle Story: The Amazing Deeds of Young Krishna.- Chapter 3: Inconvenient Wonders: Ambivalence in Hasidism about the Miraculous Powers of the Tsaddik.- Chapter 4: Qur’anic Miracle Stories: Surprising Implications for Theodicy, Transience, and Freedom.- Chapter 5: Expecting the Unexpected: Pentecostal Miracles as Performance, Production, and Placeholder.- Part II: Miracles in Polemics.- Chapter 6: On Miracles in the Vimalakīrti Sūtra during Early Medieval Period of China.- Chapter 7: “By Whose Authority?” Polemical and Political Uses of Miracle Stories.- Part III: Miracles of Healing.- Chapter 8: Miracle as Natural: A Contemporary Chinese American Religious Healer.- Chapter 9: What Miracles in the Global South Contribute to Understanding the Human Condition.- Part IV: Miracles and Morality.- Chapter 10: The Ethics of Wonder: Miracles, Magic, and Morality in Devotional Hinduism.- Chapter 11: Miracles: Two Lakota Case Studies.- Part V: Miracles, Logic, and Science.- Chapter 12: Miracles in Philosophical Analysis.- Chapter 13: Non-Interventionist Objective Divine Action and Quantum Mechanics.- Chapter 14 Miracles and the Uniformity of Nature.- Chapter 15: Investigating Miracles.- Part VI: Miracles and Mysticism.- Chapter 16: Changed in a Flash: How One Woman Was Struck by Lightning, Talked to God, and Came Back to Dream the Future.- Part VII: Comparative Conclusions.- Chapter 17: On the Epistemic Function of Miracles.- Chapter 18: Miracles: So What?.