The Reenchantment Of Nature

In this provocative assessment of the world's current ecological crisis, the author of the critically acclaimed In the Beginning exposes the false assumptions underlying the conflicts between science and religion, and proposes an innovative approach to saving the planet. Traditionally, science and religion have been thought of as two distinct and irreconcilable ways of looking at the world, and scientists have often chastised the world's religions for keeping their eyes on the heavens and paying scant attention to the destruction of Earth's precious resources and its natural wonders. In The Reenchantment of Nature, Alister McGrath, who holds doctorates in both molecular biology and divinity, challenges this long-held and dangerously misguided dichotomy. Arguing that Christianity and other great religions have always respected and revered the bounty and beauty of the earth, McGrath calls for a radical shift in perspective. He shows that by defining the world in the narrowest of scientific terms and viewing it as a collection of atoms and molecules governed by unchanging laws and forces, we have lost our ability to appreciate nature's enchantments. In order to address the threats to our environment, he maintains, it is essential to reawaken our sense of awe and look at the world as a glorious creation, an irreplaceable gift of God. In setting forth a new framework for the debate between science and religion on ecological theory, The Reenchantment of Nature points the way to integrating two different traditions in a sane and productive effort to rescue the natural world from its present environmental decline.

The Reenchantment of the World is a perceptive study of our scientific consciousness and a cogent and forceful challenge to its supremacy. Focusing on the rise of the mechanistic idea that we can know the natural world only by distancing ourselves from it, Berman shows how science acquired its controlling position in the consciousness of the West. He analyzes the holistic, animistic tradition--destroyed in the wake of Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries--which viewed man as a participant in the cosmos, not as an isolated observer. Arguing that the holistic world view must be revived in some credible form before we destroy our society and our environment, he explores the possibilities for a consciousness appropriate to the modern era. Ecological rather than animistic, this new world view would be grounded in the real and intimate connection between man and nature.

Explores how to nuture our souls while eating, dressing, traveling and so on.

Starting from the premise that we can no longer afford to live in a disenchanted world, Moore shows that a profound, enchanted engagement with life is not a childish thing to be put away with adulthood, but a necessity for one's personal and collective survival. With his lens focused on specific aspects of daily life such as clothing, food, furniture, architecture, ecology, language, and politics, Moore describes the renaissance these can undergo when there is a genuine engagement with beauty, craft, nature, and art in both private and public life. Millions of readers who found comfort and substance in Moore's previous bestsellers will discover in this book ways to restore the heart and soul of work, home, and creative endeavors through a radical, fresh return to ancient ways of living the soulful life.

Presents a revolutionary new theory that bridges the divide between science and spirituality • Discloses the ramifications of non-localized consciousness and how the physical world and spiritual experience are two aspects of the same reality • Includes contributions from Jane Goodall, Ed Mitchell, Stanislav Grof, Ralph Abraham, and Christian de Quincy, among others What scientists are now finding at the outermost frontiers of every field is overturning all the basic premises concerning the nature of matter and reality. The universe is not a world of separate things and events but is a cosmos that is connected, coherent, and bears a profound resemblance to the visions held in the earliest spiritual traditions in which the physical world and spiritual experience were both aspects of the same reality and man and the universe were one. The findings that justify this new vision of the underlying logic of the universe come from almost all of the empirical sciences: physics, cosmology, the life sciences, and consciousness research. They explain how interactions lead to interconnections that produce instantaneous and multifaceted coherence--what happens to one part also happens to the other parts, and hence to the system as a whole. The sense of sacred oneness experienced by our ancestors that was displaced by the unyielding material presumptions of modern science can be restored, and humanity can once again feel at home in the universe.

A surprising and enlightening investigation of how modern society is making nature sacred once again For more than two centuries, Western cultures, as they became ever more industrialized, increasingly regarded the natural world as little more than a collection of useful raw resources. The folklore of powerful forest spirits and mountain demons was displaced by the practicalities of logging and strip-mining; the traditional rituals of hunting ceremonies gave way to the indiscriminate butchering of animals for meat markets. In the famous lament of Max Weber, our surroundings became "disenchanted," with nature's magic swept away by secularization and rationalization. But now, as acclaimed sociologist James William Gibson reveals in this insightful study, the culture of enchantment is making an astonishing comeback. From Greenpeace eco-warriors to evangelical Christians preaching "creation care" and geneticists who speak of human-animal kinship, Gibson finds a remarkably broad yearning for a spiritual reconnection to nature. As we grapple with increasingly dire environmental disasters, he points to this cultural shift as the last utopian dream—the final hope for protecting the world that all of us must live in.

The Victorian novel clearly joins with science in the pervasive secularizing of nature and society and in the exploration of the consequences of secularization that characterized mid-Victorian England. p. viii.

This book presents a philosophical study of the idea of reenchantment and its merits in the interrelated fields of philosophical anthropology, ethics, and ontology. It features chapters from leading contributors to the debate about reenchantment, including Charles Taylor, John Cottingham, Akeel Bilgrami, and Jane Bennett. The chapters examine neglected and contested notions such as enchantment, transcendence, interpretation, attention, resonance, and the sacred or reverence-worthy—notions that are crucial to human self-understanding but have no place in a scientific worldview. They also explore the significance of adopting a reenchanting perspective for debates on major concepts such as nature, naturalism, God, ontology, and disenchantment. Taken together, they demonstrate that there is much to be gained from working with a more substantial and affirmative concept of reenchantment, understood as a fundamental existential orientation towards what is seen as meaningful and of value. The Philosophy of Reenchantment will be of interest to scholars and advanced students in philosophy—especially those working in moral philosophy, metaphysics, philosophy of religion, theology, religious studies, and sociology.