Earthly Things Immanence, New Materialisms, and Planetary Thinking

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.”

Christopher Key Chapple is Doshi Professor of Indic and Comparative Theology and founding director of the Master of Arts in Yoga Studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. A specialist in the religions of India, he has published more than twenty books, including the recent Living Landscapes: Meditations on the Five Elements in Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain Yogas (SUNY Press, 2020). He serves as advisor to multiple organizations including: the Forum on Religion and Ecology (Yale); the Ahimsa Center (Pomona); the Dharma Academy of North America (Berkeley); the Jain Studies Centre (SOAS, London); the South Asian Studies Association; and International School for Jain Studies (New Delhi). He teaches online through the Center for Religion and Spirituality (LMU) and YogaGlo. Recent book: http://www.sunypress.edu/p-6860-
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Philip Clayton holds the Ingraham Chair at Claremont School of Theology, where he directs the PhD program in comparative theologies and philosophies; he is also affiliated faculty at Claremont Graduate University. A graduate of Yale University, he has also taught at Williams College and The California State University, as well as holding guest professorships at the University of Munich, the University of Cambridge, and Harvard University. He has published two dozen books and some 350 articles. Philip is president of the Institute for Ecological Civilization (EcoCiv.org), which works internationally to support multi- sector innovations toward a sustainable society through collaborations between governments, businesses, policy experts, and NGOs. He is also president of the Institute for the Postmodern Development of China, which works with universities and government officials to promote the concept of ecological civilization through conferences, publications,
educational projects, and ecovillages. He has previously served as dean, provost, and executive vice president of a small university. In 2018 he helped to organize the Justice track for the Parliament of the World’s Religions.