John Bishop, a professor of philosophy at the University of Auckland, wrote Believing by Faith a few years ago in order to present an updated view of William James' observations on the will to believe. In his honor, I've begun this entry with the coat of arms of that University. Bishop's book is subtitled, An Essay in the Epistemology and Ethics of Religious Belief, a nod in part to an essay by William Kingdon Clifford, published in 1877, simply titled "The Ethics of Belief." Many people have since written on the cluster of issues on which Clifford and James took contrasting positions back in the 19th century, so Bishop is both returning to the source and replying to a lot of the subsequent cluster of commentary. I won't get into the particulars of what Bishop adds to the debate. I'll only say that Bishop's preface is intriguing. It describes the book he was trying to write before he ended up writing this one. "My initial motive was to ...