When people become religious believers, when they talk about their religion or engage in verbal activity in practising it, what are they doing? Although he does not believe that a simple, unqualified answer can be given to this question, Patrick Sherry thinks that it is important, that certain ideas of Wittgenstein are a help in trying to answer it and that a proper answer raises problems of truth and justification which are often ignored: “Let us then ask ourselves what pictures and concepts are used in religion and theology: we want to know how doctrines are related to the world— what is their subject matter and what kind of description are they trying to provide? Now it is unlikely that we will be able to reach a simple answer to such questions, because so-called ‘religious language’ is of many different kinds ... even putatively ‘descriptive’ or ‘fact-stating’ uses of religious language are of many types (p. 18)... We need to ask how and why the religious ‘universe of discourse’, which supposedly structures the believer’s experience, ever arose in the first place (p. 45) ... There are three tasks which need to be tackled if we are to produce a viable Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion. These are to characterise the language-games and forms of life of religion by explaining their place in our lives and experience, to relate them to other language-games, and to deal candidly with the problems of truth and justification.