Thinking Nature

A genuinely new contribution …McGrath avoids the real pitfalls into which so much contemporary discourse about the environment fall. Either humans are entirely unexceptional, mere objects in the universe alongside other objects, or they are so distinct as to be utterly unnatural and separate from the rest of nature or Creation. Escaping this false choice, McGrath argues for the recovery of a sense of humans as natural, alongside other natural beings, but possessing a unique responsibility and vocation. * Brian Treanor, Loyola Marymount University *
Thinking Nature is … the outcome of an impressive armament of interconnected research projects and a battery of relevant training, cultivated over a career just beginning to fully bloom. In it, McGrath draws upon a decade of scholarship on Heidegger, another decade of pioneering scholarship on Schelling, a variety of published essays on the German mystics, theosophists, medievals and Renaissance Neo-Hermetics who influenced them, doctorates in philosophy and theology, religious training in the Discalced Carmelite tradition, psychoanalytic training in the Jungian school, and insights gleaned from time spent at the helm of an ENGO called For A New Earth (FANE). Thinking Nature is born of the integration of contemplation and activism. -- Chandler D. Rogers, Boston College * Continental Philosophy Review *
Sean McGrath brilliantly deploys the resources of apophatic wisdom in response to the acute ecological challenge of our time. He taps the distinct eco-anxiety of contemporary culture while endorsing a radical contemplative attunement to the call of deep nature. A passionate, timely and audacious book. * Richard Kearney, Boston College *