Part I: A Promising Earth 1. Sunrise in Copan Part II: Understanding the Environmental Problem 2.... more Part I: A Promising Earth 1. Sunrise in Copan Part II: Understanding the Environmental Problem 2. An Environment in Degradation 3. The Planet and Us 4. The Possessions of Odysseus Part III: Seeking an Ethic for Nature 5. Antecedents 6. The Social Answers Part IV: Finding a Religious Sense 7. Environment and Religion 8. The Human Problem 9. Ecology as If God Were Happening Part V: Environmental Solidarity: A New Paradigm 10. Relating Environmental Solidarity to Economics, Policy and Ethics 11. Fitting Environmental Solidarity Within the Catholic Faith 12. Epilogue: Sunset in Barcelona
What should the philosophical study of religion look like in an epoch of increasing political pol... more What should the philosophical study of religion look like in an epoch of increasing political polarization, cultural ferment, and religious fragmentation? Drawing on the work of Amy Hollywood and others, I argue that philosophers seeking to understand what seem to be incommensurable moral and religious communities ought to attend more fully to the role of spiritual practice and moral formation as irreducible components of certain beliefs and ethical intuitions. However, while such an account might invite a reductive reading in which the object of religious belief is taken to be simply the practice, ritual, etc., I engage the thought of Michael Polanyi to argue that such irreducibly participatory truth claims can be understood to aim at a reality that exceeds the structures of formation and ways of life to which they are indexed.
reflection by re-visioning, seeing anew, the patterns of community, meaning, power, and transform... more reflection by re-visioning, seeing anew, the patterns of community, meaning, power, and transformation that shape families, the church, and other human communities. Transformation is both personal and societal and is integral to religious meaning, and the search for justice and transformation are interrelated. Throughout the book theory and practice are interwoven in a way that will spark questions and dialogue. Overall, the book addresses the responsibility of families and communities to engage whiteness and racial identity in ways that transform and liberate and to reject that which perpetuates injustice and oppression. Overall, the book encourages white people to use our agency to work for justice in our families and beyond.
The Anticipatory Corpse: Medicine, Power, and the Care of the Dying. By Jeffrey P. Bishop. Notre ... more The Anticipatory Corpse: Medicine, Power, and the Care of the Dying. By Jeffrey P. Bishop. Notre Dame Studies in Medical Ethics. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011. xv + 411 pp. $35.00 (paper).Although much of this extraordinary book narrates a careful genealogy of modem medicine and so attends to how things begin and develop, at its heart it is really a book about ends: the end of life, certainly, but also the ends of life, and the ways in which life's ends are elided by modem medicine. Most of the book is a searing critique and a compelling intervention into contemporary discussions of bioethics. The argument is compelling, original, and deeply important, and The Anticipatory Corpse should be high on the reading lists not only of ethicists, philosophers, and theologians, but also of clergy, hospice workers, and those in the healing professions.Jeffrey Bishop is himself both a philosopher and a physician and now leads the Albert Gnaegi Center for Health Care Ethics at Saint Louis University. At the heart of his argument is a critique of a medical nominalism that evacuates bodies of both formal and final causality and thus permits medicine the fantasy of exhaustive knowledge and potentially unimpeded power. In part 1 of the book, Bishop develops his critique through a dialogue with Michel Foucault. Bishop reconstructs and, more importantly, extends Foucault's pioneering work on the birth of the clinic. Foucault's narrative draws to a close at about 1830, but Bishop tells the story not only of the birth of the clinic but also of the transformations in medical practice and theory that have taken place in the nearly two centuries since. Like Foucault, Bishop pays attention to the way that medicine changes by shifting its primary operative space (from the formal space of diagnostic tables to the political space of public health to the putatively anaesthetized space of the clinic to the complexly negotiated space of the today's medical schools). More controversially, however, Bishop adopts a second Foucauldian thesis, namely, that modern medicine founds itself epistemologically upon the dead body as an ideal type. According to Bishop and Foucault, the corpse has become the normative body for medical knowledge. Tied to this ideal epistemology of the cadaver is a metaphysics that pays attention only to efficient causality, which is to say to the realm of bodily function rather than purposes, intelligibilities, intentions, and so forth. To treat the body in terms of function alone without regard to why the body functions is to treat the body as a kind of machine, in effect, a dead thing subject to a mediealized metaphysics of control.In the second section of the book, Bishop turns his focus from genealogy to a closer, more contemporary look at how modern medicine comports itself in its care for the dying. A chilling picture emerges of mechanized life-support, ICUs, brain death, and the problems raised by organ transplantation. Many of these topics are regularly treated in contemporary bioethics, but Bishop's genealogical work allows him to intervene in these debates in surprising and significant ways. For example, Bishop's discussion of the moral, spiritual, and biopolitical quandaries raised by patients in persistent vegetative states both illumines and substantially reorients what often seems to be an intractable cultural impasse. …
This is the introductory essay to the Special Issue “Faith after the Anthropocene” published in R... more This is the introductory essay to the Special Issue “Faith after the Anthropocene” published in Religions 11:4 and 11:5. How does the Earth’s precarious state reveal our own? How does this vulnerable condition prompt new ways of thinking and being? The essays that are part of this collection consider how the transformative thinking demanded by our vulnerability inspires us to reconceive our place in the cosmos, alongside each other and, potentially, before God. Who are we “after” (the concept of) the Anthropocene? What forms of thought and structures of feeling might attend us in this state? How might we determine our values and to what do we orient our hopes? Faith, a conceptual apparatus for engaging the unseen, helps us weigh the implications of this massive, but in some ways mysterious, force on the lives we lead; faith helps us visualize what it means to exist in this new and still emergent reality.
Early modernity tended to appeal to the trope of the book of nature as a way of securing knowledg... more Early modernity tended to appeal to the trope of the book of nature as a way of securing knowledge—including knowledge about God—against the exigencies of history and culture, but as theorists such as Timothy Morton, Bruno Latour, and others have argued, today this assumed dualism of nature and culture is both ecologically and critically suspect. What might it mean to read the book of nature in a time of ecological precarity, what many have called the Anthropocene? I will argue that premodern theological traditions of the book of nature, such as one finds in the twelfth century Hugh of Saint Victor, have something extremely important to add to a postmodern ‘terrestrial’ hermeneutics of nature, precisely because the premodern book of nature already performs the construal of nature as culture (and of culture as nature) so often recommended today by critics such as Latour, Haraway, and others. On such an account, nature is neither a fantasy object to be ignored or fled, nor a stable te...
While most textbook approaches to the philosophy of religion include a section variously entitled... more While most textbook approaches to the philosophy of religion include a section variously entitled “Religious Epistemology,” “Faith and Reason,” or “The Rationality of Belief,” in this paper I argue that a deprovinicialized, global, and critical approach to the question of faith and reason might now appear more fully under the rubric of the postcolonial revaluation of emic epistemologies. Accordingly, a global-critical philosophy of religion will challenge standard assumptions within contemporary philosophy of religion regarding the normativity of certain approaches to rationality and its justification, on the one hand, and the justification of theism as the central religious question, on the other. I argue that such a deprovinicialized philosophy of religion, while challenging certain secular norms, may embrace a religious and philosophical realism without reenthroning a single religious worldview as either culturally or epistemologically hegemonic.
As a postscript to this special issue, the author offers a set of concluding thoughts about the p... more As a postscript to this special issue, the author offers a set of concluding thoughts about the prospect of a new ritual turn within philosophy and theology and the relationship of this contemporary development to the previous ‘ritual turn’ of the early twentieth century. Where early twentieth-century scholars tended to treat ritual as repetitive symbolic behavior, and thus as something that needed to be decoded in order to be understood, the author suggests that a contemporary ritual turn involves not only thinking about ritual as symbolic, but also thinking about it as a kind of creative, formative, and performative practice. To think ritual in this manner means not only to think about ritual but also, as it were, to think with ritual.
... BOOK REVIEWS. Night Operation. By Owen Barfield and Eager Spring. By Owen Barfield.Jacob Sher... more ... BOOK REVIEWS. Night Operation. By Owen Barfield and Eager Spring. By Owen Barfield.Jacob Sherman. Article first published online: 11 OCT 2011. ... More content like this. Find more content: like this article. Find more content written by: Jacob Sherman. ...
Part I: A Promising Earth 1. Sunrise in Copan Part II: Understanding the Environmental Problem 2.... more Part I: A Promising Earth 1. Sunrise in Copan Part II: Understanding the Environmental Problem 2. An Environment in Degradation 3. The Planet and Us 4. The Possessions of Odysseus Part III: Seeking an Ethic for Nature 5. Antecedents 6. The Social Answers Part IV: Finding a Religious Sense 7. Environment and Religion 8. The Human Problem 9. Ecology as If God Were Happening Part V: Environmental Solidarity: A New Paradigm 10. Relating Environmental Solidarity to Economics, Policy and Ethics 11. Fitting Environmental Solidarity Within the Catholic Faith 12. Epilogue: Sunset in Barcelona
What should the philosophical study of religion look like in an epoch of increasing political pol... more What should the philosophical study of religion look like in an epoch of increasing political polarization, cultural ferment, and religious fragmentation? Drawing on the work of Amy Hollywood and others, I argue that philosophers seeking to understand what seem to be incommensurable moral and religious communities ought to attend more fully to the role of spiritual practice and moral formation as irreducible components of certain beliefs and ethical intuitions. However, while such an account might invite a reductive reading in which the object of religious belief is taken to be simply the practice, ritual, etc., I engage the thought of Michael Polanyi to argue that such irreducibly participatory truth claims can be understood to aim at a reality that exceeds the structures of formation and ways of life to which they are indexed.
reflection by re-visioning, seeing anew, the patterns of community, meaning, power, and transform... more reflection by re-visioning, seeing anew, the patterns of community, meaning, power, and transformation that shape families, the church, and other human communities. Transformation is both personal and societal and is integral to religious meaning, and the search for justice and transformation are interrelated. Throughout the book theory and practice are interwoven in a way that will spark questions and dialogue. Overall, the book addresses the responsibility of families and communities to engage whiteness and racial identity in ways that transform and liberate and to reject that which perpetuates injustice and oppression. Overall, the book encourages white people to use our agency to work for justice in our families and beyond.
The Anticipatory Corpse: Medicine, Power, and the Care of the Dying. By Jeffrey P. Bishop. Notre ... more The Anticipatory Corpse: Medicine, Power, and the Care of the Dying. By Jeffrey P. Bishop. Notre Dame Studies in Medical Ethics. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011. xv + 411 pp. $35.00 (paper).Although much of this extraordinary book narrates a careful genealogy of modem medicine and so attends to how things begin and develop, at its heart it is really a book about ends: the end of life, certainly, but also the ends of life, and the ways in which life's ends are elided by modem medicine. Most of the book is a searing critique and a compelling intervention into contemporary discussions of bioethics. The argument is compelling, original, and deeply important, and The Anticipatory Corpse should be high on the reading lists not only of ethicists, philosophers, and theologians, but also of clergy, hospice workers, and those in the healing professions.Jeffrey Bishop is himself both a philosopher and a physician and now leads the Albert Gnaegi Center for Health Care Ethics at Saint Louis University. At the heart of his argument is a critique of a medical nominalism that evacuates bodies of both formal and final causality and thus permits medicine the fantasy of exhaustive knowledge and potentially unimpeded power. In part 1 of the book, Bishop develops his critique through a dialogue with Michel Foucault. Bishop reconstructs and, more importantly, extends Foucault's pioneering work on the birth of the clinic. Foucault's narrative draws to a close at about 1830, but Bishop tells the story not only of the birth of the clinic but also of the transformations in medical practice and theory that have taken place in the nearly two centuries since. Like Foucault, Bishop pays attention to the way that medicine changes by shifting its primary operative space (from the formal space of diagnostic tables to the political space of public health to the putatively anaesthetized space of the clinic to the complexly negotiated space of the today's medical schools). More controversially, however, Bishop adopts a second Foucauldian thesis, namely, that modern medicine founds itself epistemologically upon the dead body as an ideal type. According to Bishop and Foucault, the corpse has become the normative body for medical knowledge. Tied to this ideal epistemology of the cadaver is a metaphysics that pays attention only to efficient causality, which is to say to the realm of bodily function rather than purposes, intelligibilities, intentions, and so forth. To treat the body in terms of function alone without regard to why the body functions is to treat the body as a kind of machine, in effect, a dead thing subject to a mediealized metaphysics of control.In the second section of the book, Bishop turns his focus from genealogy to a closer, more contemporary look at how modern medicine comports itself in its care for the dying. A chilling picture emerges of mechanized life-support, ICUs, brain death, and the problems raised by organ transplantation. Many of these topics are regularly treated in contemporary bioethics, but Bishop's genealogical work allows him to intervene in these debates in surprising and significant ways. For example, Bishop's discussion of the moral, spiritual, and biopolitical quandaries raised by patients in persistent vegetative states both illumines and substantially reorients what often seems to be an intractable cultural impasse. …
This is the introductory essay to the Special Issue “Faith after the Anthropocene” published in R... more This is the introductory essay to the Special Issue “Faith after the Anthropocene” published in Religions 11:4 and 11:5. How does the Earth’s precarious state reveal our own? How does this vulnerable condition prompt new ways of thinking and being? The essays that are part of this collection consider how the transformative thinking demanded by our vulnerability inspires us to reconceive our place in the cosmos, alongside each other and, potentially, before God. Who are we “after” (the concept of) the Anthropocene? What forms of thought and structures of feeling might attend us in this state? How might we determine our values and to what do we orient our hopes? Faith, a conceptual apparatus for engaging the unseen, helps us weigh the implications of this massive, but in some ways mysterious, force on the lives we lead; faith helps us visualize what it means to exist in this new and still emergent reality.
Early modernity tended to appeal to the trope of the book of nature as a way of securing knowledg... more Early modernity tended to appeal to the trope of the book of nature as a way of securing knowledge—including knowledge about God—against the exigencies of history and culture, but as theorists such as Timothy Morton, Bruno Latour, and others have argued, today this assumed dualism of nature and culture is both ecologically and critically suspect. What might it mean to read the book of nature in a time of ecological precarity, what many have called the Anthropocene? I will argue that premodern theological traditions of the book of nature, such as one finds in the twelfth century Hugh of Saint Victor, have something extremely important to add to a postmodern ‘terrestrial’ hermeneutics of nature, precisely because the premodern book of nature already performs the construal of nature as culture (and of culture as nature) so often recommended today by critics such as Latour, Haraway, and others. On such an account, nature is neither a fantasy object to be ignored or fled, nor a stable te...
While most textbook approaches to the philosophy of religion include a section variously entitled... more While most textbook approaches to the philosophy of religion include a section variously entitled “Religious Epistemology,” “Faith and Reason,” or “The Rationality of Belief,” in this paper I argue that a deprovinicialized, global, and critical approach to the question of faith and reason might now appear more fully under the rubric of the postcolonial revaluation of emic epistemologies. Accordingly, a global-critical philosophy of religion will challenge standard assumptions within contemporary philosophy of religion regarding the normativity of certain approaches to rationality and its justification, on the one hand, and the justification of theism as the central religious question, on the other. I argue that such a deprovinicialized philosophy of religion, while challenging certain secular norms, may embrace a religious and philosophical realism without reenthroning a single religious worldview as either culturally or epistemologically hegemonic.
As a postscript to this special issue, the author offers a set of concluding thoughts about the p... more As a postscript to this special issue, the author offers a set of concluding thoughts about the prospect of a new ritual turn within philosophy and theology and the relationship of this contemporary development to the previous ‘ritual turn’ of the early twentieth century. Where early twentieth-century scholars tended to treat ritual as repetitive symbolic behavior, and thus as something that needed to be decoded in order to be understood, the author suggests that a contemporary ritual turn involves not only thinking about ritual as symbolic, but also thinking about it as a kind of creative, formative, and performative practice. To think ritual in this manner means not only to think about ritual but also, as it were, to think with ritual.
... BOOK REVIEWS. Night Operation. By Owen Barfield and Eager Spring. By Owen Barfield.Jacob Sher... more ... BOOK REVIEWS. Night Operation. By Owen Barfield and Eager Spring. By Owen Barfield.Jacob Sherman. Article first published online: 11 OCT 2011. ... More content like this. Find more content: like this article. Find more content written by: Jacob Sherman. ...
Cuts through traditional debates to argue that religious phenomena are cocreated by human cogniti... more Cuts through traditional debates to argue that religious phenomena are cocreated by human cognition and a generative spiritual power.
Can we take seriously religious experience, spirituality, and mysticism, without reducing them to either cultural-linguistic by-products or simply asserting their validity as a dogmatic fact? The contributors to this volume argue that we can, and they offer a new way: the “participatory turn,” which proposes that individuals and communities have an integral and irreducible role in bringing forth ontologically rich religious worlds. They explore the ways this approach weaves together and gives voice to a number of robust trends in contemporary religious scholarship, including the renewed study of lived spirituality, the postmodern emphasis on embodied and gendered subjectivity, the admission of alternate epistemic perspectives, the irreducibility of religious pluralism, and the pragmatist emphasis on transformation—all trends that raise serious challenges to the currently prevalent linguistic paradigm.
The first part of the book situates the participatory turn in the context of contemporary Religious Studies; the second part shows how this approach can be applied to various global traditions, ancient and contemporary, from Western esotericism to Jewish mysticism, Christianity, Hinduism, Sufism, and socially engaged Buddhism.
Exploring the meeting of mystical and philosophical theology, Partakers of the Divine shows that ... more Exploring the meeting of mystical and philosophical theology, Partakers of the Divine shows that Christian philosophical and contemplative practices arose together and that throughout much of Christian history, philosophy, theology, and contemplation remained internal to one another.
Sherman demonstrates that the relation of philosophy, theology, and contemplation to one another provides theologians and philosophers of religion today with a way forward beyond many of the stalemates that have beset discussions about faith and reason, the role of religion in contemporary culture, and the challenges of modernity and postmodernity.
Exploring the meeting of mystical and philosophical theology, Partakers of the Divine shows that ... more Exploring the meeting of mystical and philosophical theology, Partakers of the Divine shows that Christian philosophical and contemplative practices arose together and that throughout much of Christian history, philosophy, theology, and contemplation remained internal to one another.
Sherman demonstrates that the relation of philosophy, theology, and contemplation to one another provides theologians and philosophers of religion today with a way forward beyond many of the stalemates that have beset discussions about faith and reason, the role of religion in contemporary culture, and the challenges of modernity and postmodernity.
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Can we take seriously religious experience, spirituality, and mysticism, without reducing them to either cultural-linguistic by-products or simply asserting their validity as a dogmatic fact? The contributors to this volume argue that we can, and they offer a new way: the “participatory turn,” which proposes that individuals and communities have an integral and irreducible role in bringing forth ontologically rich religious worlds. They explore the ways this approach weaves together and gives voice to a number of robust trends in contemporary religious scholarship, including the renewed study of lived spirituality, the postmodern emphasis on embodied and gendered subjectivity, the admission of alternate epistemic perspectives, the irreducibility of religious pluralism, and the pragmatist emphasis on transformation—all trends that raise serious challenges to the currently prevalent linguistic paradigm.
The first part of the book situates the participatory turn in the context of contemporary Religious Studies; the second part shows how this approach can be applied to various global traditions, ancient and contemporary, from Western esotericism to Jewish mysticism, Christianity, Hinduism, Sufism, and socially engaged Buddhism.
Sherman demonstrates that the relation of philosophy, theology, and contemplation to one another provides theologians and philosophers of religion today with a way forward beyond many of the stalemates that have beset discussions about faith and reason, the role of religion in contemporary culture, and the challenges of modernity and postmodernity.
Sherman demonstrates that the relation of philosophy, theology, and contemplation to one another provides theologians and philosophers of religion today with a way forward beyond many of the stalemates that have beset discussions about faith and reason, the role of religion in contemporary culture, and the challenges of modernity and postmodernity.