Earthly Things
Globalization and climate weirding are two of the leading phenomena that challenge and change the way we need to think and act within the planetary community. Modern Western understandings of human beings, animals, and the rest of the natural world and the subsequent technologies built on those understandings have thrown us into an array of social and ecological crises with planetary implications. Earthly Things: Immanence, New Materialisms, and Planetary Thinking, argues that more immanent or planetary ways of thinking and acting have great potential for re-thinking human-technology-animal-Earth relationships and for addressing problems of global climate weirding and other forms of ecological degradation. Older and often-marginalized forms of thought from animisms, shamanisms, and other religious traditions are joined by more recent forms of thinking with immanence such as the universe story, process thought, emergence theory, the new materialisms (NM’s), object-oriented ontologies (OOO’s), affect theory, and queer theory.
This book maps out some of the connections and differences between immanent frameworks to provide some eco-intellectual commons for thinking within the planetary community, with a particular emphasis on making connections between more recent theories and older ideas of immanence found in many of the world’s religious traditions. The authors in this volume met and worked together over five years, so the resulting volume reveals sustained and multifaceted perspectives on “thinking and acting with the planet.”
Karen Bray is Associate Professor of Religion, Philosophy, and Social Change and Director of the Honors Program at Wesleyan College. Her recent publications include Grave Attending: A Political Theology for the Unredeemed and the co-edited volume Religion, Emotion, Sensation: Affect Theories and Theologies.
Heather Eaton (Edited By)
Heather Eaton is Full Professor at St. Paul University in Ottawa, Canada. She is the author of Introducing Ecofeminist Theologies, co-editor, with Lauren Levesque, of Advancing Nonviolence and Social Transformation, and editor of The Intellectual Journey of Thomas Berry: Imagining the Earth Community.
Whitney Bauman (Edited By)
Whitney Bauman is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Florida International University in Miami, Florida. He is also co-founder and co-director of Counterpoint: Navigating Knowledge, a nonprofit based in Berlin, Germany. His publications include Religion and Ecology: Developing a Planetary Ethic andEnvironmental Ethics and Uncertainty: Tackling Wicked Problems (co-written with Kevin O’Brien).