Charles Sanders Peirce is one of the most original voices in American philosophy. His scientific career and his goal of proving scientific logic provide rich material for philosophical development. Peirce was also a life-long Christian and member of the Episcopal Church. Roger Ward traces the impact of Peirce’s religion and Christianity on the development of Peirce’s philosophy. Peirce’s religious framework is a key to his development of pragmatism and normative science in terms of knowledge and moral transformation. Peirce’s argument for the reality of God is a culmination of both his religious devotion and his life-long philosophical development.

Although few of Charles Sanders Peirce's writings were devoted explicitly to religious topics, Michael L. Raposa demonstrates that religious ideas played a central role in shaping Peirce's philosophy and are manifest throughout his corpus, in scientific and mathematical papers as well as in his writings on metaphysics, cosmology, and the normative sciences. Because Peirce's religious ideas are continuous with and integral to his reflections on these and other issues, they must be identified and understood if his work as a whole is to be interpreted properly. An organizing perspective for Raposa's study and the subject of extended commentary is Peirce's most famous essay in the philosophy of religion, "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God." Although very few of Peirce's commentators have devoted serious attention to the religious dimension of his thought, Raposa concludes that Peirce's writings are an important resource for contemporary scholars of religion and points to those of his ideas that might be most fruitfully entertained and developed.

Shows how an understanding of the intentionality underlining the pragmatism of Peirce and James can herald new interpretations of the interplay between philosophy and religion.

In Theosemiotic, Michael Raposa uses Charles Peirce’s semiotic theory to rethink certain issues in contemporary philosophical theology and the philosophy of religion. He first sketches a history that links Peirce’s thought to that of earlier figures (both within the tradition of American religious thought and beyond), as well as to other classical pragmatists and to later thinkers and developments. Drawing on Peirce’s ideas, Raposa develops a semiotic conception of persons/selves emphasizing the role that acts of attention play in shaping human inferences and perception. His central Peircean presuppositions are that all human experience takes the form of semiosis and that the universe is “perfused” with signs. Religious meaning emerges out of a process of continually reading and re-reading certain signs. Theology is explored here in its manifestations as inquiry, therapy, and praxis. By drawing on both Peirce’s logic of vagueness and his logic of relations, Raposa makes sense out of how we talk about God as personal, and also how we understand the character of genuine communities. An investigation of what Peirce meant by “musement” illuminates the nature and purpose of prayer. Theosemiotic is portrayed as a form of religious naturalism, broadly conceived. At the same time, the potential links between any philosophical theology conceived as theosemiotic and liberation theology are exposed.

The American thinker Charles Sanders Peirce, best known as the founder of pragmatism, has been influential not only in the pragmatic tradition but more recently in the philosophy of science and the study of semiotics, or sign theory. Strands of System provides an accessible overview of Peirce's systematic philosophy for those who are beginning to explore his thinking and its import for more recent trends in philosophy.

Is hope an attitude of wishful thinking or is it a volitional appropriation of what is to come? What does it mean to believe in a divine promise, anticipating but not experiencing its fulfillment? Theology of Anticipation responds to these questions with a constructive study of C. S. Peirce's philosophy. It explores Peirce's strong but ambiguous links to the tradition of 19th century classical German philosophy and the unique way he resurrected this tradition's theoretical content in the American context. Then introducing Wolfhart Pannenberg's philosophical theology of anticipation in a discussion of Peirce's epistemological application of the theory of abduction, Anette Ejsing reads these two in light of each other, with the goal of proposing a Peircean theology of anticipation. With this proposal, she offers a new model for how both rational inquirers and believing theologians can take for real in the present what belongs permanently to the future. This model describes the human pursuit of cognitive as well as personal fulfillment (of understanding and meaning) as anchored in a promise of fulfillment, which makes it an expression of anticipatory hope. Considering Peirce's religious writings of systematic importance for his philosophy, Theology of Anticipation offers critical comments to two existing interpretations of Peirce's philosophy of religion: Michael L. Raposa's theosemiotic and Robert S. Corrington's Peircean theology of divine potentialities.