Naturalism's Philosophy of the Sacred furthers the tradition of religious naturalism by offering an approach to the sacred through the metaphysical categories of ordinality and ontological parity put forward by twentieth-century American naturalist Justus Buchler. The book's chief argument is that the most effective antidote to religious violence is an aesthetic interpretation of the sacred understood as an order in and of nature.

This book introduces Robert Corrington’s “ecstatic naturalism,” a new perspective in understanding “sacred” nature and naturalism, and explores what can be done with this philosophical thought. This is an excellent resource for scholars of Continental philosophy, philosophy of religion, and American pragmatism.

American naturalists all agree that traditional theism, with its belief in a supernatural personal god who is absolutely transcendent to nature, is inconsistent with the view that nature is all that there is. Yet despite the rejection of the traditional God of theism, some naturalists have found pantheism, with its belief in a divinity thoroughly immanent to nature, congenial. Nonetheless, no philosophically rigorous and systematic juxtaposition of the metaphysical and ethical commitments of pantheism with those of naturalism has been undertaken. (...) This essay seeks to fill that gap by investigating the viability of pantheism from the perspective of the ordinal naturalism of Justus Buchler. Several reasons can be .. (shrink)