This is just a postscipt to my last contribution. 

On the one hand, I suppose we are getting a little off track by focusing strongly on the philosophy of religion; on the other, I suppose discussions of the analytic/continental divide can quite reasonably divert into particular areas to discuss whether or not the divide is operative there and in what ways. From the little we've said about the philosophy of religion, it seems that this is one area in which there is, surprisingly, some common ground: both sides of the divide tend to give priority to the Judeo-Christian tradition.

To that extent, I personally find myself isolated from both sides, as my comments have indicated. In my view, any worthwhile philosophy of religion today needs to take account of religion as a broad phenomenon across a wide range of cultures. Putting the point as starkly as possible, I would want a philosophy of religion to be as attentive to, say, the Christianity of St Francis, based so much on ideas of brotherhood, kindness, and self-denial, as it would be to, say, the religion of the Aztecs in which mass human sacrifice was an essential element. Both, I would argue, manifest - or anyway presumably manifest - the sense of the sacred that seems fundamental to religion, and I personally could never be satisfied with an account of religion that threw in the towel where the Aztecs (for example) are concerned, or arbitrarily excluded them.

There is an interesting parallel with the world of art.  We would not think for a moment today of restricting the term 'art' to objects from European culture. Objects from Africa, ancient Egypt, India, Pre-Columbian America and so on are as much a part of our world of art today as Rembrandt and Picasso, and any account of art worth its salt has to take account of this (though in fact both analytic and continental aesthetics seldom do...). 

In short, I think it is quite untenable today to put on cultural blinkers, pretend we are still in the nineteenth century, and try to ignore what we know from anthropology and ancient history - even if that knowledge is incomplete. Philosophy of all stripes, I would argue, needs to be open to other areas of study - e.g. anthropology, history. Not of course in a non-critical way, but in ways that show sensitivity to what is being thought and discovered in those areas. The price of not doing so, surely, is ossification and irrelevance.

DA