This book examines the ways in which religious communities experimentally engage the world and
function as fallible inquisitive agents despite frequent protests to the contrary. Using the
philosophy of inquiry and semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce it develops unique naturalist
conceptions of religious meaning and ultimate orientation while also arguing for a reappraisal
of the ways in which the world's venerable religious traditions enable novel forms of communal
inquiry into what Peirce termed vital matters. Pragmatic inquiry it argues is a ubiquitous
and continuous phenomenon. Thus religious participation though cautiously conservative in
many ways is best understood as a variety of inhabited experimentation. Religious communities
embody historically mediated hypotheses about how best to engage the world and curate networks
of semiotic resources for rendering those engagements meaningful. Religions best fulfill their
inquisitive function when they both deploy and reform their sign systems as they learn better
to engage reality.
