Entangled Worlds : Religion, Science, and New Materialisms

Keller, Catherine (EDT); Rubenstein, Mary-jane (EDT)

ISBN 10: 082327621X / ISBN 13: 9780823276219

Published by Fordham University Press, 2017

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Bibliographic Details

• Title: Entangled Worlds : Religion, Science, and New Materialisms
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Publication Date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 082327621X
• ISBN 13: 9780823276219
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: As New

About this title

Synopsis

Historically speaking, theology can be said to operate “materiaphobically.” Protestant Christianity in particular has bestowed upon theology a privilege of the soul over the body and belief over practice, in line with the distinction between a disembodied God and the inanimate world “He” created. Like all other human, social, and natural sciences, religious studies imported these theological dualisms into a purportedly secular modernity, mapping them furthermore onto the distinction between a rational, “enlightened” Europe on the one hand and a variously emotional, “primitive,” and “animist” non-Europe on the other.

The “new materialisms” currently coursing through cultural, feminist, political, and queer theories seek to displace human privilege by attending to the agency of matter itself. Far from being passive or inert, they show us that matter acts, creates, destroys, and transforms―and, as such, is more of a process than a thing. Entangled Worlds examines the intersections of religion and new and old materialisms. Calling upon an interdisciplinary throng of scholars in science studies, religious studies, and theology, it assembles a multiplicity of experimental perspectives on materiality: What is matter, how does it materialize, and what sorts of worlds are enacted in its varied entanglements with divinity?

While both theology and religious studies have over the past few decades come to prioritize the material contexts and bodily ecologies of more-than-human life, Entangled Worlds sets forth the first multivocal conversation between religious studies, theology, and the body of “the new materialism.” Here disciplines and traditions touch, transgress, and contaminate one another across their several carefully specified contexts. And in the responsiveness of this mutual touching of science, religion, philosophy, and theology, the growing complexity of our entanglements takes on a consistent ethical texture of urgency.

About the Authors

Catherine Keller is George T. Cobb Professor of Constructive Theology in The Graduate Division of Religion, Drew University. She works amid the tangles of ecosocial, pluralist, feminist philosophy of religion and theology. Her books include Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming; On the Mystery; Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement; Political Theology of the Earth: Our Planetary Emergency and the Struggle for a New Public. She has co-edited several volumes of the Drew Transdisciplinary Theological Colloquium, most recently Political Theology on Edge: Ruptures of Justice and Belief in the Anthropocene. Her latest monograph is Facing Apocalypse: Climate, Democracy, and Other Last Chances.

Mary-Jane Rubenstein is professor of religion and science in society at Wesleyan University, and is affiliated with the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program. She holds a BA from Williams College, an MPhil from Cambridge University, and a PhD from Columbia University. Her research unearths the philosophies and histories of religion and science, especially in relation to cosmology, ecology, and space travel. She is the author of Pantheologies: Gods, Worlds, Monsters (Columbia University Press, 2018); Worlds without End: The Many Lives of the Multiverse (Columbia University Press, 2014); and Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe (Columbia University Press, 2009). She is also co-editor with Catherine Keller of Entangled Worlds: Religion, Science, and New Materialisms (Fordham University Press, 2017), and co-author with Thomas A. Carlson and Mark C. Taylor of Image: Three Inquiries in Technology and Imagination (University of Chicago Press, 2021). Her latest book is titled Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race (University of Chicago Press, 2022).