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Biography of Edgar Sheffield BrightmanName: Edgar Sheffield BrightmanBirth Date: September 20, 1884 Death Date: 1953 Place of Birth: Holbrook, Massachusetts, United States Nationality: American Gender: Male Occupations: philosopher, religious scholar Edgar Sheffield Brightman A leading exponent of American Personalism, Edgar Sheffield Brightman (1884-1953) was an eminent philosopher of religion. His provocative idea of a God limited in power was a unique effort to solve the problem of suffering and evil.Born in a Methodist parsonage in Holbrook, Massachusetts, on September 20, 1884, Edgar Sheffield Brightman showed an early interest in the scholarly life. He studied Greek in after-school hours when in high school in Whitman, Massachusetts, and began writing articles on stamp collecting when he was 16. By the time he was 18, he had had 46 such articles published. Before he entered Brown University in 1902, he worked for a year in a grocery store earning a week. After receiving his bachelor's degree in 1906, he stayed on at Brown as an assistant in philosophy and Greek and completed his M.A. in philosophy in 1908.Later that year he began studying for the ministry at Boston University and there came …showed first 150 words…
…showed last 150 words…there are certain brutish facts that are "given" in his nature. God creatively works with them but cannot suddenly decree that heavy objects will not fall or hurricanes will cease to blow. With this idea of God, religious people can have trust in a divine companion whose power is sufficient to guide the universe towards "inexhaustible perfectibility" and whose will is ever directed to his children's good. Further Reading Edgar Sheffield Brightman is listed in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 1. In addition to his key books, many of which are in public libraries and most in university libraries, there are two essays of interest: Andrew Reck, "The Philosophy of Edgar Sheffield Brightman," in Recent American Philosophy (1962) and Daniel Callahan's "Human Experience and God: Brightman's Personalistic Theism," in Michael Novack (editor) American Philosophy and the Future (1968). Martin Luther King, Jr. speaks of his debt to Brightman in his Stride Toward Freedom (1958). |