Cosmology, Ecology, and the Energy of God
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This book brings together process and postmodern theologians to reflect on the crucial topic of energy, asking: What are some of the connections between energy and theology? How do ideas about humanity and divinity interrelate with how we live our lives?
Its contributors address energy in at least three distinct ways. First, in terms of physics, the discovery of dark energy in 1998 uncovered a mysterious force that seems to be driving the expansion of the universe. Here cosmology converges with theological reflection about the nature and origin of the universe.
Second, the social and ecological contexts of energy use and the current energy crisis have theological implications insofar as they are caught up with ultimate human meanings and values.
Finally, in more traditional theological terms of divine spiritual energy, we can ask how human conceptions of energy relate to divine energy in terms of creative power.
“Adds new stimulus to serious deliberations on the consumption of resources, the stewardship of nature, and the deeper spiritual connotations
of human embodiment.”
This is a volume that aims to expand our range of theological concepts for ecology and for God. New ground is broken here, and there is much to contemplate.---—Environmental Ethics
“This bold set of essays finally puts theology into the twenty-first century
precisely because it confronts the core truth of our very existence—that
energy is the omnipresent force shot through all things. But it is not some
sloppy, vague thesis full of smoke and mirrors; it carefully unpacks the
divinity of the cosmos in intellectually entertaining terms. This book will
shock you—because it risks seriously thinking through the relationship
between energy and the divine.”
Donna Bowman is Associate Professor and Associate Dean of the Honors College at the University of Central Arkansas. She is the author of The Divine Decision: A Process Doctrine of Election and co-editor (with Jay McDaniel) of Handbook of Process Theology.
Clayton Crockett is Professor and Director of Religious Studies at the University of Central Arkansas. He is the author a number of books, including Deleuze Beyond Badiou: Ontology, Multiplicity and Event, Interstices of the Sublime: Theology and Psychoanalytic Theory (Fordham), and, with Ward Blanton, Jeffrey W. Robbins, and Noëlle Vahanian, An Insurrectionist Manifesto: Four New Gospels for a Radical Politics.