Edward Scribner Ames (1870-1958) was a minister in the Christian Church, a.k.a. Disciples of Christ. He served as minister of the Hyde Park Christian Church from 1900 to l940. Having received his undergraduate degree from Drake College, BD and two years towards a doctorate at Yale University, he completed a PhD in philosophy in 1895 with John Dewey as chair of the department of philosophy at the University of Chicago. After teaching at Butler College for three years, he returned to Hyde Park Church and became a part time teacher in philosophy at the University of Chicago. Eventually Ames taught more and more and became chair of the department. At the University of Chicago he also became the founder of Disciples Divinity House, for which he served as Dean until 1945.Ames is significant as a philosopher who adapted Christianity to the philosophy of pragmatism and the world of modern science. Ames’ hundreds of publications are held at the Disciples Divinity House at the University of Chicago, with the works in this volume being his unpublished manuscripts. In these lectures Ames devotes five lectures to explaining Christianity in terms of pragmatism to Disciples ministers. In other lectures he focuses on the philosophy of John Locke and its impact of the development of the Christian Church. Ames also developed a report for the Commission for the Restudy of the Disciples, The Philosophical Background on Disciples. In other ministerial lectures he presented a series of four lectures on The Reasonableness of Christianity. Also included are his alumni lecture at Yale Divinity in 1932 titled Imagery and Meaning in Religious Ideas; the Gates Memorial Lectures at Grinnell College titled This Human Life; a lecture at Northwestern University on The Will to Believe; and four lectures at the Pastors’ Institute in 1938 on When Science Comes to Religion. Ames addressed the Pastors’ Institute again in 1939 in four lectures on the Religious Implications of John Dewey’s Philosophy.
