This article argues that efforts to understand the relationship of science and theology beyond th... more This article argues that efforts to understand the relationship of science and theology beyond the dichotomies of nature and culture might be aided by reconsidering the 20th c. debate between Henri Bergson and Albert Einstein. Rather than merely a contest over proper science or even the demarcation of science and philosophy, I argue that the real issue in their debate was a question of continuing importance for the contemporary dialogue of science and theology, namely: what is the heart of nature, and who gets to speak for it? KEYWORDS Bergson; Einstein; metaphysics; theology and science; time; nature Early in the twentieth century, Alfred North Whitehead raised anew the philosophical problem of the concept of nature when he argued that philosophy, science, and theology had equally been misled by the bifurcation of nature into a series of invidious dualisms, most especially the dualism of nature as given scientific fact, true but never exhaustively known, and the manifest image of experience, which we know but regard as a dream. 1 A century later, such concerns about the nature of nature appear even more salient, not least for the dialogue of theology and science which must continually raise the question: what is nature, and just as importantly, who gets to speak about it? In order to address such questions concretely, this essay proposes a reconsideration of a legendary debate between two of Whitehead's contemporaries, indeed, the two most illustrious European intellectuals of the early twentieth-century:
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.
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...
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.
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.
... Sharma.27 And for postcolonial studies, we isolate as a representative sample the works of Ri... more ... Sharma.27 And for postcolonial studies, we isolate as a representative sample the works of Richard King on Hinduism and mysticism, Donald S. Lopez on Buddhism, David Chidester on indigenous African religions, Michael Taus-sig on shamanism, and Laura E. Donaldson ...
DO WE REALLY need another "turn" in academia and the study of religion? After all, it seems that ... more DO WE REALLY need another "turn" in academia and the study of religion? After all, it seems that when one or another turn has been proposedwhether linguistic, interpretive, narrative, pragmatic, or postcolonial-scholars often presented it as a kind of epistemic rupture with the past, a revolutionary paradigmatic shift that would drastically change the way the phenomena studied in their disciplines are to be approached. Whereas claims of epistemic rupture may sound pretentious today, we think that the route of creative scholarship is more like a winding road than a straight highway, and that certain turns are therefore unavoidable if genuine or substantial progress is to be made in any discipline.
This article argues that efforts to understand the relationship of science and theology beyond th... more This article argues that efforts to understand the relationship of science and theology beyond the dichotomies of nature and culture might be aided by reconsidering the 20th c. debate between Henri Bergson and Albert Einstein. Rather than merely a contest over proper science or even the demarcation of science and philosophy, I argue that the real issue in their debate was a question of continuing importance for the contemporary dialogue of science and theology, namely: what is the heart of nature, and who gets to speak for it? KEYWORDS Bergson; Einstein; metaphysics; theology and science; time; nature Early in the twentieth century, Alfred North Whitehead raised anew the philosophical problem of the concept of nature when he argued that philosophy, science, and theology had equally been misled by the bifurcation of nature into a series of invidious dualisms, most especially the dualism of nature as given scientific fact, true but never exhaustively known, and the manifest image of experience, which we know but regard as a dream. 1 A century later, such concerns about the nature of nature appear even more salient, not least for the dialogue of theology and science which must continually raise the question: what is nature, and just as importantly, who gets to speak about it? In order to address such questions concretely, this essay proposes a reconsideration of a legendary debate between two of Whitehead's contemporaries, indeed, the two most illustrious European intellectuals of the early twentieth-century:
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.
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...
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.
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.
... Sharma.27 And for postcolonial studies, we isolate as a representative sample the works of Ri... more ... Sharma.27 And for postcolonial studies, we isolate as a representative sample the works of Richard King on Hinduism and mysticism, Donald S. Lopez on Buddhism, David Chidester on indigenous African religions, Michael Taus-sig on shamanism, and Laura E. Donaldson ...
DO WE REALLY need another "turn" in academia and the study of religion? After all, it seems that ... more DO WE REALLY need another "turn" in academia and the study of religion? After all, it seems that when one or another turn has been proposedwhether linguistic, interpretive, narrative, pragmatic, or postcolonial-scholars often presented it as a kind of epistemic rupture with the past, a revolutionary paradigmatic shift that would drastically change the way the phenomena studied in their disciplines are to be approached. Whereas claims of epistemic rupture may sound pretentious today, we think that the route of creative scholarship is more like a winding road than a straight highway, and that certain turns are therefore unavoidable if genuine or substantial progress is to be made in any discipline.
Uploads
Papers by Jacob Sherman