The interaction between neuroscience and theology is producing a new personalism: a response to commentators on my book “Religion, neuroscience and the self: a new personalism.”

critical realization that we are to a signi cant de by our and that we thrive best when we maintain a lively and open-ended sense of futurity. Particularly interesting is the critical grounding of this key theological trait in important brain functions, such as the Predictive Processing Framework. personal relationships; and, (3) the state, the fi nal repository of force that irresistibly imposes a settlement on the inevitable con fl icts between individuals and sectional groups within a larger whole … In this threefold distinction between (as the critical realists put it) personal agency, cultural meaning, and social/political struc- ture, the church operates primarily in the intermediate zone of culture, neither privatized to a trivial “ spiritual not religious ” zone of irrelevant lifestyle choices, nor weaponized with the state ’ s coercive machinery, but instead o ff ering a community beyond the family but beneath the state, that seeks to persuade through its shared ritual expression and ethical practice of faith, hope and love. be seen as the general categories pertaining to the person ’ s spontaneous spiritual openness and dynamism to transcendence (in traditional terms, the natural desire for God), while the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love can be seen as the speci fi c content and ful fi lment of those open-ended aspirations.