donald crosby

Reviewed in Pantheist Vision, Vol. 17., No. 3, Autumnal Equinox, 1996:

This collection of essays by academic philosophers and theologians were selected from presentations at the Second International Conference on Philosophical Theology, held at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, August, 1993. The focus of the conference was on religion and ecology. It resulted in a widely divergent collection, including perspectives from Naturalism, Feminist theory, and American Religious Liberal thought.

Several of the essays are of great interest for Pantheists. In J. Edward Barrett's "Ecological Reverence: Or, Religion Rediscovering Reality," this theologian, although grounding every theological statement in a Biblical text, explicitly embraced Pantheism. He argued that in the future people will less and less distinguish between the spiritual world and the secular world: "The religious realist is the person concerned with the holiness of what can be touched - in nature and history, social, inter-personal, and family life - and not with that which is above or outside of nature and human experience... In tomorrow's planet, religion will increasingly be concerned with the reality in which 'we live and move and have our being,' and will have the character of 'ecological reverence.'" Barrett then asks the question: "But, is this not simply Pantheism?" And he answers, "If it is, then we should be all means make the most of it, and become conscious pantheists."

Barrett's is not the only voice of Pantheism in this book. J. Harley Chapman adopts a clearly pantheist expression in his essay, "The Practice of Natural Piety as a Spiritual Discipline", although he never uses the term. Chapman writes, "Natural piety... Is the awe-filled respect for, and the often-attending delight in, the presence of the divine in the natural world; as a discipline, it is, additionally, a practice, an intentional structure of behavior, the end of which is to foster the experience of the divine in nature." He stresses that this is much more than simply "getting a kick out of nature." He describes five overlapping themes to delimit what is meant by natural piety: A non-utilitarian openness to nature; An awareness sensitive and appreciative but nonetheless disciplined; The aesthetic; Depth, power, and mystery of the aesthetic whole; The Infinite in the finite.

Finally, a third essay, by Charles S. Milligan, not only embraces Pantheism, but, as the title indicates, makes "The Eco-Religious Case for Naturalistic Pantheism."
Milligan's brand of pantheism is naturalistic, significantly different from panentheism, gnosticism, absolute idealism, materialism and spiritualism. "Pantheism is the view that the whole of reality is God... Reality, naturalistically perceived, consists of pervasively interrelated entities of many modes and varieties, including their relational and qualitative attributes... There is no bifurcation of reality, but one comprehensive realm of all that is, has been, and potentially might be."… (mehr)