In A Common Faith, eminent American philosopher John Dewey calls for the "emancipation of the true religious quality" from the heritage of dogmatism and supernaturalism that he believes characterizes historical religions. He describes how the depth of religious experience and the creative role of faith in the resources of experience to generate meaning and value can be cultivated without making cognitive claims that compete with or contend with scientific ones. In a new introduction, Dewey scholar Thomas M. Alexander contextualizes the text for students and scholars by providing an...

John Dewey (October 20, 1859 - June 1, 1952) was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer whose ideas have been very influential to education and social reform. Dewey, along with Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, is recognized as one of the founders of the philosophy of pragmatism and of functional psychology. He was a major representative of the progressive and progressive populist philosophies of schooling during the first half of the 20th century in the USA. In his advocacy of democracy, Dewey considered two fundamental elements-schools and civil society-as...

Abandon the notion of subject-matter as something fixed and ready-made in itself, outside the child s experience; cease thinking of the child s experience as also something hard and fast; see it as something fluent, embryonic, vital; and we realize that the child and the curriculum are simply two limits which define a single process. from The Child and the Curriculum In this single volume, readers will find two of John Dewey s insightful essays on education in America. He considered proper education to be fundamental to a functioning democracy. The problem, according to Dewey in The School...