For permission to incorporate adapted portions of an essay first appearing in Early American Lite... more For permission to incorporate adapted portions of an essay first appearing in Early American Literature (volume 10, 1975) into my fourth chapter, I am grateful to the current publishers of that journal. Thomas Gibbs of the Redwood Athenaeum in Newport, Rhode Island, allowed me to cite a brief passage from Edward Taylors unpublished "Theological Notes" manuscript. And like other students of Taylor, I have benefited from the use of Gene Russell's Concordance to the Poems of Edward Taylor (Microcard Editions, 1973) and am pleased to acknowledge here this otherwise unspoken debt. There are several whom I wish ,to thank more personally for diverse gifts of advice and assistance with the manuscript.
Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, 2021
Brett Malcolm Grainger, Church in the Wild: Evangelicals in Antebellum America (Cambridge, MA: Ha... more Brett Malcolm Grainger, Church in the Wild: Evangelicals in Antebellum America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019), 280 pp., $45 (hbk).
By the early nineteenth century, in writings by Bryant, Cooper, and Emerson, one can observe a gr... more By the early nineteenth century, in writings by Bryant, Cooper, and Emerson, one can observe a growing Romantic tendency to imagine Nature in religious terms--as a favored site of worship and a source of revelation largely superseding the Christian scriptures. Both literary artists and Hudson River painters highlighted their impressions of the sacred sublime in American landscapes. And as civilized settlements continued to replace the older freedom of life on the frontier, James Fenimore Cooper dramatized the problematic ethical consequences of this change in his Leatherstocking novels, above all in The Pioneers. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s vision of the nonhuman world as divine “cosmos,” or “beauty” is most memorably presented in his book Nature (1836), which celebrates the intersection between Nature and Civilization he discovered on the “common” space of a village green in Concord, Massachusetts. Emerson’s poem “The Adirondacs,” which describes a camping excursion interrupted by news o...
By the late seventeenth century, Puritan leaders in colonial America were bemoaning what they per... more By the late seventeenth century, Puritan leaders in colonial America were bemoaning what they perceived to be the betrayal of New England’s godly “errand into the wilderness.” In election sermons they mourned the community’s backsliding from its global mission as a “city upon a hill.” Such doomsday rhetoric echoed the lamentations of decline intoned by ancient Hebrew prophets such as Jeremiah. Yet this “Jeremiad” discourse characteristically reached beyond effusions of doom and gloom toward prospects of renewal through a conversion of heart. It blended warnings of impending catastrophe with hope for recovery if the erring souls it addressed chose to repent. This twofold identity of the Puritan Jeremiad, gradually refashioned into the American Jeremiad, has long resonated within and beyond this nation’s literary culture. Featured in creative nonfiction, jeremiad expression surfaces in various forms. And with rise of the modern environmental movement, a prophetic subspecies identifiab...
For permission to incorporate adapted portions of an essay first appearing in Early American Lite... more For permission to incorporate adapted portions of an essay first appearing in Early American Literature (volume 10, 1975) into my fourth chapter, I am grateful to the current publishers of that journal. Thomas Gibbs of the Redwood Athenaeum in Newport, Rhode Island, allowed me to cite a brief passage from Edward Taylors unpublished "Theological Notes" manuscript. And like other students of Taylor, I have benefited from the use of Gene Russell's Concordance to the Poems of Edward Taylor (Microcard Editions, 1973) and am pleased to acknowledge here this otherwise unspoken debt. There are several whom I wish ,to thank more personally for diverse gifts of advice and assistance with the manuscript.
For both Emerson and Thoreau, ocular attentiveness was a crucial means of at least disposing the ... more For both Emerson and Thoreau, ocular attentiveness was a crucial means of at least disposing the soul toward experiencing moments of otherwise unpredictable, ecstatic encounter with the divine soul of Nature. But the eye alone was not the sole sensory pathway toward receiving such revelations. Especially in later writing, Thoreau focused special attention on eating and drinking as key bodily-yet also spiritual-modes of experiencing communion with the earth. He applied this sacramental understanding to the several processes of obtaining, preparing, and consuming food, but above all to the thankful appreciation of locally gathered, wild fruits and nuts. Such gifts, freely given, presumably invite "us to picnic with Nature," thereby dramatizing how "man at length stands in such a relation to Nature as the animals which pluck and eat as they go." Though Emerson never embraced a comparably sacramental vision of Nature, or showed the same interest in gustatory encounter with wildness, one might interpret his attraction toward other diverse and often spiritualized concepts of communion as a compensatory outcome of his ministerial decision in 1832 to cease administering the Christian church's sacrament of the Lord's Supper.
The longstanding European tradition of meditating on creatures of the phenomenal world carried bo... more The longstanding European tradition of meditating on creatures of the phenomenal world carried both religious and ecological significance for New England Puritans, who were peculiarly disposed to ponder the relation between earth’s visible and invisible domains. This disposition is exemplified by the poetry of meditation composed by colonial writers such as Edward Taylor and Anne Bradstreet. Bradstreet’s meditative poem “Contemplations” is interpreted ecocritically, so as to probe not only the spirituality of the world that the poet sets forth, but also the discretely material spirit of place that helped inspire her reflections. Outside the Puritan colonies, other forms of ecospirituality can be discerned in the Quaker-inspired prose writings of naturalist William Bartram and social reformer John Woolman. Both exponents of Middle Atlantic Quaker piety envisioned a divine love that encompasses animals as well as humans, and that thereby extends humanity’s ethical responsibility beyon...
Unlike most environmental prose, present-day “ecopoetry” centers its imaginative attention on pra... more Unlike most environmental prose, present-day “ecopoetry” centers its imaginative attention on praise rather than protest, love of earth rather than rage. It reflects newfound awareness of nature’s violence, as seen in Mary Oliver’s poems; or of what science discloses about nature’s unseen and unfathomable intricacy, as seen in Pattiann Rogers’s poetry. Surprisingly, though, the meditative temper of contemporary ecopoetry often sustains a religious impulse of wonder concerning humanity’s relation to the nonhuman world. Varied forms of this earth-centered religious disposition can be witnessed in Wendell Berry’s Sabbath Poems, Gary Snyder’s Mountains and Rivers Without End, and Denise Levertov’s late series of meditations on the near-presence of Mount Rainier in Seattle.
This study conducted two tests. The pretest selected apologue popular on the Internat and typical... more This study conducted two tests. The pretest selected apologue popular on the Internat and typical in college students' life. After pre-post test, the apologue which could induce corresponding emotions was screened out. In the formal test, after affective priming, subjects' emotional state was measured, and MJT was used to test the moral judgment capacity of college students. It was found that the moral judgment capacity in the positive mood condition was significantly lower than that in the control group, and the moral judgment capacity in the control group was significantly lower than that in the negative mood group; the differences of the moral judgment capacity were not significant in different positive emotional conditions and also in different negative emotional conditions; the differences of the moral judgment capacity of males were more significant than those of females; the differences of senior students were more significant than those of freshmen, and were not significant in other grades.
What might it mean, existentially and spiritually, for humans to form an intimate relation with d... more What might it mean, existentially and spiritually, for humans to form an intimate relation with discrete sites or dwelling places on earth? In ancient Rome, the notion of a locale’s genius loci signaled recognition of its enchanted, enspirited identity. But in a digitalized America of unprecedented mobility, can place still matter as seed ground for the soul? Such questions had been broached already by “ecocritics” concerned with how place-inflected experience figures in literature and by theologians concerned with “ecotheology” and “ecospirituality.” Yet this book offers a uniquely integrative perspective, informed by a theological phenomenology of place, that takes fuller account of the spiritualities associated with built environments than ecocriticism typically does. Spirits of Place blends theological and cultural analysis with personal reflection while focusing on the multilayered witness presented by American literary texts. Its interpretive readings range across texts by an ...
Despite his arresting talents as a poet, Edward Taylor presents no comparable claims to originali... more Despite his arresting talents as a poet, Edward Taylor presents no comparable claims to originality as a theologian. Apparently this New Englander's mind was no match for that of Jonathan Edwards: most of Taylor's theological ideas were not only orthodox, but commonplace. Yet the poet's religious anthropology would seem to be one notable exception. In both prose and verse, Taylor is continually breaking into chants of heartfelt wonder over the exalted state bestowed upon human nature by Christ's redemption: “The Highest Design of Divine Wisdom, and the richest, and the most Glorious Design of Divine Grace … is pitched upon Mankinde, and Humane Nature. For higher exaltation Created Nature seems utterly incapable of than to be made partaker of all the Fulness of the Godheads, bodily.”
... Harriet married yet another clergyman of this stamp, Calvin Stowe. Even if the populist theol... more ... Harriet married yet another clergyman of this stamp, Calvin Stowe. Even if the populist theology of figures like Henry Ward Beecher showed considerable deviation from strict Calvinist orthodoxy, members of the Beecher clan were plainly at home in the denominational ...
“Imagination,” a word evidently central to the vocation and sensibility of English Romantic poets... more “Imagination,” a word evidently central to the vocation and sensibility of English Romantic poets, is likewise invoked often as a defining term in American literary history. But what are the theological implications of this crucial category, beginning with Coleridge’s seminal statements about it? How might the human faculty of imagination—often but doubtfully associated with an abstractly ethereal quality of mind—bear upon concrete facts of the world humans experience? And how, in the light of philosophic perspectives, together with Wendell Berry’s provocative reflections on “imagination in place,” might Imagination be understood as integral with the phenomenology of place? Such questions are addressed here by means of themes bearing on the Earthiness of Imagination, the Contemplative Reach of Imagination, and Numinous Layers of Place as Palimpsest. Literary texts analyzed to develop these themes include Whitman’s verse and works by two contemporary writers—poet Marilyn Nelson and novelist Alfred Véa.
This chapter considers some practical applications of place-based inquiry, beginning with an asse... more This chapter considers some practical applications of place-based inquiry, beginning with an assessment of site-grounded ventures in learning at collegiate institutions across the United States. Site-based learning amounts to an extension of the long-standing but beleaguered residential model of higher education. Such programs may also expose students to the spirituality of “contemplative ecology,” thereby contributing to one version of holistic education. The chief rationale for contemplative learning in place rests on enlarging students’ awareness and understanding of place, as well as their capacity for place-making. Chapter 5 finally explores these issues in relation to a localized case study, involving a course conducted at the University of the South. Through a combination of field visits, contemplative exercises, readings, and group discussion, this course aims to develop students’ sense of how sacral and other notions of place matter—to them personally, as well as to other h...
No longer viewed as mere prologue to the emergence of authentic American literature, colonial wri... more No longer viewed as mere prologue to the emergence of authentic American literature, colonial writing displays a fertile diversity of literary styles, genres, and linguistic traditions. Yet its array of expressive forms differs markedly from that which latter-day readers of short stories, novels, and plays usually expect “literature” to look like. Colonial writers, not motivated by ambition to create art for art’s sake, penned instead a multitude of sermons, treatises, chronicles, histories, letters, conversion narratives, political pronouncements, slave and captivity narratives, travel reports, and promotional tracts. Such works of creative nonfiction continue to deserve attention today—not only for what they reveal about the formative cultural mythology of the American nation but also because of the rhetorical artistry invested in compositions as varied as William Bradford’s History of Plymouth Plantation, Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, or Thomas Jefferson’s draft version of t...
For permission to incorporate adapted portions of an essay first appearing in Early American Lite... more For permission to incorporate adapted portions of an essay first appearing in Early American Literature (volume 10, 1975) into my fourth chapter, I am grateful to the current publishers of that journal. Thomas Gibbs of the Redwood Athenaeum in Newport, Rhode Island, allowed me to cite a brief passage from Edward Taylors unpublished "Theological Notes" manuscript. And like other students of Taylor, I have benefited from the use of Gene Russell's Concordance to the Poems of Edward Taylor (Microcard Editions, 1973) and am pleased to acknowledge here this otherwise unspoken debt. There are several whom I wish ,to thank more personally for diverse gifts of advice and assistance with the manuscript.
Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, 2021
Brett Malcolm Grainger, Church in the Wild: Evangelicals in Antebellum America (Cambridge, MA: Ha... more Brett Malcolm Grainger, Church in the Wild: Evangelicals in Antebellum America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019), 280 pp., $45 (hbk).
By the early nineteenth century, in writings by Bryant, Cooper, and Emerson, one can observe a gr... more By the early nineteenth century, in writings by Bryant, Cooper, and Emerson, one can observe a growing Romantic tendency to imagine Nature in religious terms--as a favored site of worship and a source of revelation largely superseding the Christian scriptures. Both literary artists and Hudson River painters highlighted their impressions of the sacred sublime in American landscapes. And as civilized settlements continued to replace the older freedom of life on the frontier, James Fenimore Cooper dramatized the problematic ethical consequences of this change in his Leatherstocking novels, above all in The Pioneers. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s vision of the nonhuman world as divine “cosmos,” or “beauty” is most memorably presented in his book Nature (1836), which celebrates the intersection between Nature and Civilization he discovered on the “common” space of a village green in Concord, Massachusetts. Emerson’s poem “The Adirondacs,” which describes a camping excursion interrupted by news o...
By the late seventeenth century, Puritan leaders in colonial America were bemoaning what they per... more By the late seventeenth century, Puritan leaders in colonial America were bemoaning what they perceived to be the betrayal of New England’s godly “errand into the wilderness.” In election sermons they mourned the community’s backsliding from its global mission as a “city upon a hill.” Such doomsday rhetoric echoed the lamentations of decline intoned by ancient Hebrew prophets such as Jeremiah. Yet this “Jeremiad” discourse characteristically reached beyond effusions of doom and gloom toward prospects of renewal through a conversion of heart. It blended warnings of impending catastrophe with hope for recovery if the erring souls it addressed chose to repent. This twofold identity of the Puritan Jeremiad, gradually refashioned into the American Jeremiad, has long resonated within and beyond this nation’s literary culture. Featured in creative nonfiction, jeremiad expression surfaces in various forms. And with rise of the modern environmental movement, a prophetic subspecies identifiab...
For permission to incorporate adapted portions of an essay first appearing in Early American Lite... more For permission to incorporate adapted portions of an essay first appearing in Early American Literature (volume 10, 1975) into my fourth chapter, I am grateful to the current publishers of that journal. Thomas Gibbs of the Redwood Athenaeum in Newport, Rhode Island, allowed me to cite a brief passage from Edward Taylors unpublished "Theological Notes" manuscript. And like other students of Taylor, I have benefited from the use of Gene Russell's Concordance to the Poems of Edward Taylor (Microcard Editions, 1973) and am pleased to acknowledge here this otherwise unspoken debt. There are several whom I wish ,to thank more personally for diverse gifts of advice and assistance with the manuscript.
For both Emerson and Thoreau, ocular attentiveness was a crucial means of at least disposing the ... more For both Emerson and Thoreau, ocular attentiveness was a crucial means of at least disposing the soul toward experiencing moments of otherwise unpredictable, ecstatic encounter with the divine soul of Nature. But the eye alone was not the sole sensory pathway toward receiving such revelations. Especially in later writing, Thoreau focused special attention on eating and drinking as key bodily-yet also spiritual-modes of experiencing communion with the earth. He applied this sacramental understanding to the several processes of obtaining, preparing, and consuming food, but above all to the thankful appreciation of locally gathered, wild fruits and nuts. Such gifts, freely given, presumably invite "us to picnic with Nature," thereby dramatizing how "man at length stands in such a relation to Nature as the animals which pluck and eat as they go." Though Emerson never embraced a comparably sacramental vision of Nature, or showed the same interest in gustatory encounter with wildness, one might interpret his attraction toward other diverse and often spiritualized concepts of communion as a compensatory outcome of his ministerial decision in 1832 to cease administering the Christian church's sacrament of the Lord's Supper.
The longstanding European tradition of meditating on creatures of the phenomenal world carried bo... more The longstanding European tradition of meditating on creatures of the phenomenal world carried both religious and ecological significance for New England Puritans, who were peculiarly disposed to ponder the relation between earth’s visible and invisible domains. This disposition is exemplified by the poetry of meditation composed by colonial writers such as Edward Taylor and Anne Bradstreet. Bradstreet’s meditative poem “Contemplations” is interpreted ecocritically, so as to probe not only the spirituality of the world that the poet sets forth, but also the discretely material spirit of place that helped inspire her reflections. Outside the Puritan colonies, other forms of ecospirituality can be discerned in the Quaker-inspired prose writings of naturalist William Bartram and social reformer John Woolman. Both exponents of Middle Atlantic Quaker piety envisioned a divine love that encompasses animals as well as humans, and that thereby extends humanity’s ethical responsibility beyon...
Unlike most environmental prose, present-day “ecopoetry” centers its imaginative attention on pra... more Unlike most environmental prose, present-day “ecopoetry” centers its imaginative attention on praise rather than protest, love of earth rather than rage. It reflects newfound awareness of nature’s violence, as seen in Mary Oliver’s poems; or of what science discloses about nature’s unseen and unfathomable intricacy, as seen in Pattiann Rogers’s poetry. Surprisingly, though, the meditative temper of contemporary ecopoetry often sustains a religious impulse of wonder concerning humanity’s relation to the nonhuman world. Varied forms of this earth-centered religious disposition can be witnessed in Wendell Berry’s Sabbath Poems, Gary Snyder’s Mountains and Rivers Without End, and Denise Levertov’s late series of meditations on the near-presence of Mount Rainier in Seattle.
This study conducted two tests. The pretest selected apologue popular on the Internat and typical... more This study conducted two tests. The pretest selected apologue popular on the Internat and typical in college students' life. After pre-post test, the apologue which could induce corresponding emotions was screened out. In the formal test, after affective priming, subjects' emotional state was measured, and MJT was used to test the moral judgment capacity of college students. It was found that the moral judgment capacity in the positive mood condition was significantly lower than that in the control group, and the moral judgment capacity in the control group was significantly lower than that in the negative mood group; the differences of the moral judgment capacity were not significant in different positive emotional conditions and also in different negative emotional conditions; the differences of the moral judgment capacity of males were more significant than those of females; the differences of senior students were more significant than those of freshmen, and were not significant in other grades.
What might it mean, existentially and spiritually, for humans to form an intimate relation with d... more What might it mean, existentially and spiritually, for humans to form an intimate relation with discrete sites or dwelling places on earth? In ancient Rome, the notion of a locale’s genius loci signaled recognition of its enchanted, enspirited identity. But in a digitalized America of unprecedented mobility, can place still matter as seed ground for the soul? Such questions had been broached already by “ecocritics” concerned with how place-inflected experience figures in literature and by theologians concerned with “ecotheology” and “ecospirituality.” Yet this book offers a uniquely integrative perspective, informed by a theological phenomenology of place, that takes fuller account of the spiritualities associated with built environments than ecocriticism typically does. Spirits of Place blends theological and cultural analysis with personal reflection while focusing on the multilayered witness presented by American literary texts. Its interpretive readings range across texts by an ...
Despite his arresting talents as a poet, Edward Taylor presents no comparable claims to originali... more Despite his arresting talents as a poet, Edward Taylor presents no comparable claims to originality as a theologian. Apparently this New Englander's mind was no match for that of Jonathan Edwards: most of Taylor's theological ideas were not only orthodox, but commonplace. Yet the poet's religious anthropology would seem to be one notable exception. In both prose and verse, Taylor is continually breaking into chants of heartfelt wonder over the exalted state bestowed upon human nature by Christ's redemption: “The Highest Design of Divine Wisdom, and the richest, and the most Glorious Design of Divine Grace … is pitched upon Mankinde, and Humane Nature. For higher exaltation Created Nature seems utterly incapable of than to be made partaker of all the Fulness of the Godheads, bodily.”
... Harriet married yet another clergyman of this stamp, Calvin Stowe. Even if the populist theol... more ... Harriet married yet another clergyman of this stamp, Calvin Stowe. Even if the populist theology of figures like Henry Ward Beecher showed considerable deviation from strict Calvinist orthodoxy, members of the Beecher clan were plainly at home in the denominational ...
“Imagination,” a word evidently central to the vocation and sensibility of English Romantic poets... more “Imagination,” a word evidently central to the vocation and sensibility of English Romantic poets, is likewise invoked often as a defining term in American literary history. But what are the theological implications of this crucial category, beginning with Coleridge’s seminal statements about it? How might the human faculty of imagination—often but doubtfully associated with an abstractly ethereal quality of mind—bear upon concrete facts of the world humans experience? And how, in the light of philosophic perspectives, together with Wendell Berry’s provocative reflections on “imagination in place,” might Imagination be understood as integral with the phenomenology of place? Such questions are addressed here by means of themes bearing on the Earthiness of Imagination, the Contemplative Reach of Imagination, and Numinous Layers of Place as Palimpsest. Literary texts analyzed to develop these themes include Whitman’s verse and works by two contemporary writers—poet Marilyn Nelson and novelist Alfred Véa.
This chapter considers some practical applications of place-based inquiry, beginning with an asse... more This chapter considers some practical applications of place-based inquiry, beginning with an assessment of site-grounded ventures in learning at collegiate institutions across the United States. Site-based learning amounts to an extension of the long-standing but beleaguered residential model of higher education. Such programs may also expose students to the spirituality of “contemplative ecology,” thereby contributing to one version of holistic education. The chief rationale for contemplative learning in place rests on enlarging students’ awareness and understanding of place, as well as their capacity for place-making. Chapter 5 finally explores these issues in relation to a localized case study, involving a course conducted at the University of the South. Through a combination of field visits, contemplative exercises, readings, and group discussion, this course aims to develop students’ sense of how sacral and other notions of place matter—to them personally, as well as to other h...
No longer viewed as mere prologue to the emergence of authentic American literature, colonial wri... more No longer viewed as mere prologue to the emergence of authentic American literature, colonial writing displays a fertile diversity of literary styles, genres, and linguistic traditions. Yet its array of expressive forms differs markedly from that which latter-day readers of short stories, novels, and plays usually expect “literature” to look like. Colonial writers, not motivated by ambition to create art for art’s sake, penned instead a multitude of sermons, treatises, chronicles, histories, letters, conversion narratives, political pronouncements, slave and captivity narratives, travel reports, and promotional tracts. Such works of creative nonfiction continue to deserve attention today—not only for what they reveal about the formative cultural mythology of the American nation but also because of the rhetorical artistry invested in compositions as varied as William Bradford’s History of Plymouth Plantation, Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, or Thomas Jefferson’s draft version of t...
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