James Carse is an #educator, #author, and #speaker. Carse went to school at the age of five and never left. He was Director of Religious Studies at New York University for thirty years, a member of the Department of Middle Eastern Studies, and the recipient of numerous teaching awards.
He identifies as an #atheist but says he is religious "in the sense that I am endlessly fascinated with the unknowability of what it means to be human, to exist at all." Carse's recent work on religion and belief provides a foil to New Atheism. His ideas about religion and belief were featured on the May 4, 2012 CBC Radio series Ideas titled After Atheism: New Perspectives on God and Religion, Part 4.
His published work reflects the broad interests he brought to the study of religion and its place in the world. His novel, PhDeath, grew out of a life-long dedication to the institutions of higher education and profound alarm at the self-inflicted degradation of the university; "Western civilization’s noblest creation."
Books
Jonathan Edwards & The Visibility of God. Charles Scribner's Sons (1967)
Death and Existence: A Conceptual History of Human Mortality (1980)
Finite and Infinite Games (1987)
Breakfast at the Victory (1994)
PhDeath: The Puzzler Murders (2016)