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openness, of freedom, and, by extension, of responsibility.

On Christian and theological terms, it is to

allow, following Rorty, that there is no telos in the sense that conversation is itself a gift (received by

faith), not a means through which we will achieve our salvation, even while we can at the same time hope

for the eschatological transformation of our conversation and its objects that reflects the gloriousness of

what will be revealed.

This raises, finally, what would Peirce have to say the possibility of a pragmatic theology. We

could here certainly comment at length either about Peirce`s own theistic beliefs and Episcopalian piety,

or about pragmatism as a distinct expression of what Henry S. Levinson has called the American

aesthetic tradition of spirituality.

What I want to focus on, however, is Peirce`s own conception of

pragmatism as a method of inquiry. He recollects that pragmatism was invented to express a certain

maxim of logic.... The maxim is intended to furnish a method for the analysis of concepts.

Succinctly

stated, the pragmatic maxim asserts: Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical

bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the

whole of our conception of the object.

Peirce spent the better part of his lifetime exploring the

consequences of this maxim for science, philosophy and religion. But by 1905, he noted that pragmatism

had come to be associated predominantly with one aspect of James` theory of truth--crudely understood

as that which worked

--and with the humanism of the British philosopher, F. C. S. Schiller. As such,

See John Dewey, The Development of American Pragmatism, in H. S. Thayer, ed., Pragmatism: The

Classic Writings (New York: Mentor Books, and New American Library, 1970), 23-40, esp. 32-33.

Here I can do no better but grant Rorty`s point (Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, 27) that Peirce`s

notion of the teleological convergence of inquiry or of a limit-ideal of truth (Grenzbegriff) has theological roots.

Henry Samuel Levinson, Santayana, Pragmatism, and the Spiritual Life (Chapel Hill, NC, and London:

The University of North Carolina Press, 1992), locates the classical pragmatists in the same religio-aesthetic tradition
as that of Edwards, Emerson, and Santayana. A large portion (Book II, over 200 pages) of volume VI of the
Collected Papers documents Peirce`s thoughts about religion, including his famous A Neglected Argument for the
Reality of God. The secondary literature on this topic--beginning with book-length studies by Donna Orange,
Peirce's Conception of God: A Developmental Study (Lubbock, TX: Institute for Studies in Pragmatism, 1984), and
Michael Raposa, Peirce's Philosophy of Religion (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1989)--is enormous.

Peirce, Collected Papers, 8.191.

Peirce, Collected Papers, 5.2; cf. 5.9, 5.14ff., and passim.

No doubt in his own way, James` writings--e.g., Pragmatisms Conception of Truth, in James, Essays in

Pragmatism, ed. Alburey Castell (New York: Hafner Publishing Company, 1948), 159-76, and James, The Meaning
of Truth: A Sequel to `Pragmatism' (London and New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1914)--provided the