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.”

Introduction
Karen Bray, Heather Eaton, and Whitney Bauman | 1

Confucianism as a Form of Immanental Naturalism
Mary Evelyn Tucker | 15

Immanence in Hinduism and Jainism: New Planetary Thinking?
Christopher Key Chapple | 31

Mountains Preach the Dharma: Immanence in Maha¯ya¯na Buddhism
Christopher Ives | 49

Africana Sacred Matters: Religious Materialities in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas
Elana Jefferson-Tatum | 60

We have always been animists . . .
Graham Harvey | 74

Indigenous Cosmovisions and a Humanist Perspective on Materialism
John Grim | 88

Amorous Entanglements: The Matter of Christian Panentheism
Catherine Keller | 99

On the Matter of Hope: Weaving Threads of Jewish Wisdom for the Sake of the Planetary
O’neil Van Horn | 111

Oily Animations: On Protestantism and Petroleum
Terra Schwerin Rowe | 123

Interreligious Approaches to Sustainability Without a Future:
Two New Materialist Proposals for Religion and Ecology
Kevin Minister | 136

Which Materialism, Whose Planetary Thinking?
Joerg Rieger | 148

Rewilding Religion for a Primeval Future
Sarah M. Pike | 161

Planetary Thinking, Agency, and Relationality: Religious Naturalism’s Plea
Carol Wayne White | 173

Dancing Immanence: A Philosophy of Bodily Becoming
Kimerer L. LaMothe | 186

The Animist, Almost Feminist, Quite Nearly Pantheist Old Materialism of Giordano Bruno
Mary-Jane Rubenstein | 198

Emergence Theory and the New Materialisms
Kevin Schilbrack | 210

New Materialisms and Planetary Persistence, Purpose, and Politics
Heather Eaton | 222

Gut Theology: The Peril and Promise of Political Affect
Karen Bray | 234

The Entangled Relations of Our Ecological Crisis:
Religion, Capitalism’s Logics, and New Forms of Planetary Thinking
Matthew R. Hartman | 248

Solidarity with Nonhumans: Being Ecological with Object-Oriented Ontology
Sam Mickey | 260

Developing a Critical Romantic Religiosity for a Planetary Community
Whitney A. Bauman | 274

Matter Values: Ethics and Politics for a Planet in Crisis
Philip Clayton | 289

Acknowledgments | 303

Bibliography | 305

List of Contributors | 335

Index | 341