Earthly Things

Immanence, New Materialisms, and Planetary Thinking

Karen Bray, Whitney Bauman, Heather Eaton

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781531503062, 9781531503055
• eBook ISBN: 9781531503079
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Critical Theory

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."

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Confucianism as a Form of Immanental Naturalism
• Immanence in Hinduism and Jainism: New Planetary Thinking?
• Mountains Preach the Dharma: Immanence in Mahāyāna Buddhism
• Africana Sacred Matters: Religious Materialities in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas
• We have always been animists …
• Indigenous Cosmovisions and a Humanist Perspective on Materialism
• Amorous Entanglements: The Matter of Christian Panentheism
• On the Matter of Hope: Weaving Threads of Jewish Wisdom for the Sake of the Planetary
• Oily Animations: On Protestantism and Petroleum
• Interreligious Approaches to Sustainability Without a Future: Two New Materialist Proposals for Religion and Ecology
• Which Materialism, Whose Planetary Thinking?
• Rewilding Religion for a Primeval Future
• Planetary Thinking, Agency, and Relationality: Religious Naturalism’s Plea
• Dancing Immanence: A Philosophy of Bodily Becoming
• The Animist, Almost Feminist, Quite Nearly Pantheist Old Materialism of Giordano Bruno
• Emergence Theory and the New Materialisms
• New Materialisms and Planetary Persistence, Purpose, and Politics
• Gut Theology: The Peril and Promise of Political Affect
• The Entangled Relations of Our Ecological Crisis: Religion, Capitalism’s Logics, and New Forms of Planetary Thinking
• Solidarity with Nonhumans: Being Ecological with Object-Oriented Ontology
• Developing a Critical Romantic Religiosity for a Planetary Community
• Matter Values: Ethics and Politics for a Planet in Crisis
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliography
• List of Contributors
• Index