On the academic front, questions about belief in God lie at the interface between philosophy and theology, yet philosophers and theologians come to the subject with very different expectations. The prevailing tide of contemporary analytic philosophy tends to be strongly naturalistic, and any reference to the supernatural will cause many readers to switch off. One task of the believing philosopher, as I see it, is to try to open the minds of secular readers to the immense riches of the religious culture that has come down to us—a culture whose texture used to be deeply woven into the conceptual fabric of Western thought, but which in many cases has scarcely touched the education or upbringing of younger generation intellectuals, at least in Western Europe. (In North America, the problem is rather different, not so much of ignorance of religious culture, but of a marked polarization between its supporters and its critics.)
(John Cottingham, Why Believe? [London: Continuum, 2009], x)
