Suffering and Evil in Nature: Comparative Responses from Ecstatic Naturalism and Healing Cultures

(Hardback)

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Suffering and Evil in Nature: Comparative Responses from Ecstatic Naturalism and Healing Cultures, edited by Joseph E. Harroff and Jea Sophia Oh, provides many unique experiments in thinking through the implications of ecstatic naturalism. This collection of essays directly addresses the importance of values sustaining cultures of healing and offers a variety of perspectives inducing radical hope requisite for cultivating moral and political imaginings of democracy-to-come as a regulative ideal. Through its invocation of healing cultures, the collection foregrounds the significance of the active, gerundive, and processual nature of ecstatic naturalism as a creative horizon for realizing values of intersubjective flourishing, while also highlighting the significance of culture as an always unfinished project of making discursive, interpretive and ethical space open for the subaltern and voiceless. Each contribution gives voice to the tensions and contradictions felt by living participants in emergent communities of interpretationnamely those who risk replacing authoritarian tendencies and fascist prejudices with a faith in future-oriented archetypes of healing to make possible truth and reconciliation between oppressor and oppressed, victimizers and victims of violence and trauma. These essays then let loose the radical hope of healing from suffering in a ceaseless community of communication within a horizon of creative democratic interpretation.

Reviews

Suffering and Evil in Nature: Comparative Responses from Ecstatic Naturalism and Healing Cultures furnishes us with fresh and provocative insights on the relevance of nature and entry points for queries on individual subjectivities, communal agency, and emergence of beauty at the edges of natural and societal destruction. In a comparative, constructive, and innovative manner, the philosophical ruminations of Roberto Corringtons trope of nothingness are interwoven and serve as a basis for dialog on the sublime and terrifying aspects of unconscious and conscious experiences of 'holes in nature.' Nature, as an actor in collaboration with the human, assumes a complex and ambiguous role in the rise and ongoing presence of evil and suffering in our contemporary scene of racism, sexism, technocracy, nationalism, and ecosystemic annihilation. This collection of essays is a rare gift to any reader who is also seeking to courageously and resolutely co-create natural openings of breath within deterministic constructs of being in the world.

-- Elaine Padilla, University of La Verne

If you think Robert Corringtons philosophy is a little wild, with its appeal to the unconscious of nature and human selving, wait until you read this book. Corrington and . . . : ancient middle Platonism, experience of values, Lovecraftian horror stories, being sunk, transformation in religious education, political feminism, world loyalty, ecofeminism and patriarchal metaphysics, the Great Mother and yin-yang thinking, story-telling and evil, the posthuman and advaya, Korean posthumanism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and evil in the anthropocene.

-- Robert Cummings Neville, Boston University

Suffering and Evil in Nature: Comparative Responses from Ecstatic Naturalism and Healing Cultures is a collection of creative responses to perennial human problems of evil and suffering. The authors expand Robert S. Corringtons vision of ecstatic naturalism into diverse realms of thinking including metaphysical, phenomenological, feminist, relational, posthuman, Confucian and so on. This book is a vital contribution to the ongoing emergence of a creative community of interpretation seeking to make sense and ultimately transform pressing contemporary problems from an ecstatic naturalist perspective via East-West dialogues.

-- Hyun-Shik Jun, Yonsei University

What convivial teamwork by Jea Sophia Oh and Joseph Harroff that has called forth this munificent set of essays! Improbably, the problem of suffering and evil, freed of its pattern of theodicies and dichotomies, gains--as question--a fresh, even mesmerizing, disclosive force. With historical depth and ethical pragmatism, with subtle Western autocritique and multi-vocal Asian augmentation, the demanding intensities of race, gender, democracy and ecology come into a philosophical solidarity of untamed difference. Its multivocality, however, does not explode and fragment. Rather its intensities tune to the hospitable tradition of 'ecstatic naturalism.' Indeed this anthology performs the 'communicating community of creatively democratic interpretation' that its editors brilliantly frame.

-- Catherine Keller, Drew University

Author Bio

Joseph E. Harroff teaches philosophy and religion at American University.

Jea Sophia Oh is associate professor of philosophy at West Chester University of Pennsylvania.