An Eco-Spirituality of Wonder: An Aesthetic-Ethical Response to Myriad Nature

Document Type

Contribution to Book

Source Publication

Environmental Reflection on the Anthropocence

Publication Date

2025

Editor

Gabriel R. Ricci

Publisher

Routledge

City

New York

Edition

1st

ISBN

978-1-032-47230-0

First Page

150

Last Page

164

Department

Religious Studies

Description

For some religionists and humanists, the impact of anthropogenic disruptions also brings us face to face with the Anthropocene paradox. As one consequence of hegemonic culture’s triumphalist view of humans as standing outside of nature and managing nature to our own benefit, this current epoch also presents a rupture to our conventional, established notions of ourselves and assumptions about our place in the matrix of life. In this chapter, I address this paradox, exploring the possibility of an eco-spirituality that arises during this transitional time in which the old order strains and fractures. This eco-spirituality is grounded in the tenets of religious naturalism, which reframes humans as natural processes in relationship with other forms of nature. With its distinctive conception of humanity’s embeddedness in materiality and its constitutive relationality, religious naturalism generates distinctive aesthetical-ethical responses to current forms of ecological degradation and environmental injustices. These aesthetical-ethical responses are what I identify with the “turn to wonder.” Accordingly, this eco-spirituality of wonder inspires new ways of understanding human seeing, knowing, and acting. In this context, an eco-spirituality anticipates what possibilities and wonders may occur when human organisms enact our evolutionary capacities as relational organisms that can love, engaging in multilayered processes of changing behaviors, values, and relationships that promote the betterment of myriad nature.

This document is currently not available here.

Share

COinS