First Sentence

"When I began the study of the philosophy of religion in the 1960s, the subject had two main emphases: a historical element, largely devoted to the interaction, sometimes positive, sometimes negative, between western philosophy and the Christian religion, certainly from Plato to Kant, but then very much in the British and later Anglo-American, empiricist tradition; and a topic-oriented element, where we learned to wrestle with the standard problems of the philosophy of religion: arguments for the existence of God, the concept of God, miracle and providence, the problem of evil, the soul and immortality and the relation between faith and reason."