Suffering and Evil in Nature

Comparative Responses from Ecstatic Naturalism and Healing Cultures

Joseph E. Harroff, Jea Sophia Oh

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Year: 2021
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781978772311
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Comparative Religion

Suffering and Evil in Nature: Comparative Responses from Ecstatic Naturalism and Healing Cultures, edited by Joseph E. Harroff and Jea Sophia Oh, provides many unique experiments in thinking through the implications of ecstatic naturalism. This collection of essays directly addresses the importance of values sustaining cultures of healing and offers a variety of perspectives inducing radical hope requisite for cultivating moral and political imaginings of democracy-to-come as a regulative ideal. Through its invocation of "healing cultures," the collection foregrounds the significance of the active, gerundive, and processual nature of ecstatic naturalism as a creative horizon for realizing values of intersubjective flourishing, while also highlighting the significance of culture as an always unfinished project of making discursive, interpretive and ethical space open for the subaltern and voiceless. Each contribution gives voice to the tensions and contradictions felt by living participants in emergent communities of interpretation—namely those who risk replacing authoritarian tendencies and fascist prejudices with a faith in future-oriented archetypes of healing to make possible truth and reconciliation between oppressor and oppressed, victimizers and victims of violence and trauma. These essays then let loose the radical hope of healing from suffering in a ceaseless community of communication within a horizon of creative democratic interpretation.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• I: A Deep Opening of Nothingness
• Chapter 1: Providence and Providingness: On Platonic and Ecstatic Naturalist Good, Evil, and Infinity
• Chapter 2: The Experience of Values and the Possibility of Ordinal Phenomenology in Corrington’s Deep Pantheism
• Chapter 3: Dwelling with the Deep Ones: Lovecraftian Horror and the Selving Process
• II: Facing Suffering and Violence
• Chapter 4: On Being Sunk?
• Chapter 5: Racism, Religious Education, and Transformation
• Chapter 6: A Phenomenological Study of Feminist Political Consciousness
• III: Ecological World Horizons
• Chapter 7: Recapturing World-Loyalty: A Relational Response to Ecological Violence
• Chapter 8: Fecundity and Healing of the Great Mother: Reading Corrington’s Nature and Nothingness via Yin-Yang Thinking
• IV: Nurturing Nature and Posthumanism
• Chapter 9: Evil as Human Resistance to the Indifferent Force of the Primal Nature: On Storytelling Animals
• Chapter 10: The Posthuman and an Advaya Dialectic of Sacrifice
• Chapter 11: Education for the Symbiosis of Humans and Machines in a Posthuman Age
• V: (A)theodicy through the Anthropocene
• Chapter 12: Selving in a Dangerous World: William James, Buddhism, and Ecstatic Naturalism
• Chapter 13: Redemptive Suffering with Tianming 天命: An Ecstatically Naturalist Reading of Sacred Selving in Confucian Ethics
• Chapter 14: We Have Met the Enemy, and He Is Us: The Nature of Evil and the Evil of Nature in the Anthropocene
• Index
• About the Contributors