Talks by Gary Slater
Papers by Gary Slater
The metaphor of the cry of the Earth is increasingly prominent within the rhetoric of integral ec... more The metaphor of the cry of the Earth is increasingly prominent within the rhetoric of integral ecology. This essay argues that, in spite of its rhetorical power, this metaphor would benefit from critical attention in at least three respects: how perceiving a cry translates into judgment and praxis, how the cry implicates human-nonhuman relations, and how the cry navigates specificity and vagueness. Such critical attention contributes to our understanding of integral ecology in four ways. First, it enhances the integral ecology's reading of the "signs of the times." Second, it deflects key critiques of integral ecology, including its handling of anthropocentrism and its inability to apply its values. Third, it speaks to conversations on integral ecology's reimagining of the values of dignity and solidarity. Fourth, it points toward further applications, most notably an exploration of how the cry of the Earth relates to the cry of the poor.
American Journal of Theology & Philosophy, 2013
Religions, Nov 19, 2017
This piece recommends the implicit as a resource for examining normativity within the study of re... more This piece recommends the implicit as a resource for examining normativity within the study of religion. Attention to the implicit serves at least two purposes toward this end. First, it gives the scholar of religion a clearer sense of the norms of the communities she seeks to understand, norms that, depending partly on one's methodological commitments, may be evaluated as well as described. Second, it deepens the scholar's reflections on the implicit norms that guide her own work. These claims-which extend the work of Tyler Roberts, Kevin Schilbrack, and Thomas A. Lewis-are embedded within specific understandings of language and mind as drawn from Robert Brandom and Peter Ochs. Brandom and Ochs help speak to the questions of whether the academic study of a religious tradition can or should evaluate that tradition, answering "yes" and "it depends", respectively. This presents scholars of religion with both a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge is that religionists no longer have recourse to a strict distinction between fact and value. The opportunity is that, by linking implicit facts and values to explicit analysis and evaluation, scholarly investigations can be expanded in both descriptive and prescriptive contexts.
The evolutionary debunking argument advanced by Sharon Street, Michael Ruse, and Richard Joyce em... more The evolutionary debunking argument advanced by Sharon Street, Michael Ruse, and Richard Joyce employs the logic of Paul Griffiths and John Wilkins to contend that humans cannot have knowledge of moral truths, since the evolutionary process that has produced our basic moral intuitions lacks causal connections to those (putative) truths. Yet this argument is self-defeating, as its aim is the categorical, normative claim that we should suspend our moral beliefs in light of the discoveries about their non-truth-tracking origins, when it is precisely this claim that relies upon the normativity under attack. This paper cites Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914) to argue that such self-defeat can be avoided by expanding upon the basic structure of Griffiths and Wilkins’ argument, provided that one embraces a version of realism that corresponds with Peirce’s doctrine of final causation. So construed, final causation reconciles real generals (including real moral values) with natural selection and undergirds further speculation of moral facts within values per se.
(1) Coursedescription In this course we will cover the beliefs, liturgy, and history of the Chris... more (1) Coursedescription In this course we will cover the beliefs, liturgy, and history of the Christian tradition, from the Mediterranean to East Asia, from Black theology to the Christian Right. Encountered along the way will be Christian debates about God, Jesus, and human beings, as well as a study of differences among the Christianity's three largest communities, Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox. The aim is to introduce students to both the historical trajectories and contemporary diversity of a movement that has had an incalculable impact on world history, as well as help students develop the methods necessary for understanding some key terms and debates within Christian theology. Through an understanding of the historical patterns that have shaped the practices shared (and not shared) by contemporary Christianity's two billion practitioners, students can better grasp the diversity within the tradition, as well as the range of approaches-cultural, economic, etc-by which one can study it. By the end of the semester, students will understand the origins of core Christian doctrines, how the tradition spread, how it split into Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant Christianity, the main characteristics of Christian churches in different regions of the world, and latter-day developments including Christian ecology, the Jesus Movement, and liberation theology.
Book Reviews by Gary Slater
Marcel Proust once wrote: "truth will be attained…when [the writer] takes two different objects, ... more Marcel Proust once wrote: "truth will be attained…when [the writer] takes two different objects, states the connection between them…and encloses them in the necessary links of a well-wrought style…within a metaphor." Inspired in part by Henri Bergson (1859Bergson ( -1941, whom Megan Craig's Levinas and James identifies as
The Trinity and an Entangled World is a compilation of fourteen essays written by scientists, phi... more The Trinity and an Entangled World is a compilation of fourteen essays written by scientists, philosophers, and theologians who are united under a common belief: insights attained through natural science and Trinitarian theology offer symbiotic understandings and speak to the possibility of a viable relational ontology. The term 'relational ontology', which refers to a metaphysics that assigns being to relation (unlike, say, substance), is a concept that can be interrogated along various lines, yet premised in its definition is the implication that both Newtonian physics and the Kantian transcendental subject, its philosophical counterpart, are obsolete. Perhaps inevitably in such a diffuse compilation, certain arguments in the book emerge as more compelling and intelligible than others. Jeffrey Bub, for example, catalogues twentieth-century advancements in theoretical physics to claim that, as currently understood, the most fundamental aspect of reality is entanglement, a relatively uncontroversial claim that is nonetheless presented in a virtually impenetrable style. Editor John Polkinghorne, on the other hand, implies in his introduction that not only does such entanglement display nontrivial parallels to the Christian Trinity, but that Trinitarian doctrine offers the ideal model for understanding our reality-a considerably bolder claim. Wesley Wildman, for his part, surveys a range of philosophical and religious understandings of the notion of relationality, a sophisticated presentation that runs aground on its insistence that relation ought to be reduced to causality in order to become intelligible. Of particular interest is Argyris Nicolaidis' discussion of the triadic metaphysics of the American philosopher C.S. Peirce , whose work is seen to create a semantic space in which theological and scientific interpretations might be equally entertained. Less successful is David Martin's essay on the sociological dimension of relational ontology, which purports to explain how sociology might ground theological questions, but which succeeds only up to the point at which sociological theory intersects with philosophy to bear on each other's operative questions.
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Talks by Gary Slater
Papers by Gary Slater
Book Reviews by Gary Slater