Description
Book SynopsisAmerican Immanence seeks to replace the dominant American political tradition, which has resulted in global social, economic, and environmental injustices, with a new form of political theology, its dominant feature a radical democratic politics. Michael S. Hogue explores the potential of a dissenting immanental tradition in American religion.
Trade ReviewHow at this moment of American precarity can one book combine such precise prophetic timeliness with so vast a conceptual apparatus? How can it remain at once lucidly engaging in its activating rhetoric and philosophically nuanced in its theopolitics? How can it bring home to us the planetary force of anthropocene uncertainty without one bout of apocalyptic hysteria? Read Hogue and learn how! -- Catherine Keller, author of
Cloud of the Impossible and
On the Mystery"American immanence," "the fourth trial of democracy," "a bifocal political theology," "the Anthropocene paradox"—with these explosive concepts, Hogue provides us with activist, democratic ways to think and respond to the contemporary tradition. Both drawing and working upon James, Dewey, and Whitehead to come to terms with the contemporary condition, this book inspires and illuminates the democratic Left at the same time. A necessary read today. -- William E. Connolly, author of
Facing the Planetary: Entangled Humanism and the Politics of Swarming This is one of the finest integrations of complex streams of American thought that I have read in a long time. Hogue has given us a theopolitical vision of "nature" that is at once philosophically stirring and religiously relevant to the perplexities of our Anthropocene paradox.
American Immanence draws upon James, Dewey, Whitehead, and their lineage to make a sophisticated case for pragmatic naturalism. It is elegant, erudite, and morally urgent. -- Nancy Frankenberry, Dartmouth College
American Immanence offers a powerful indictment of contemporary social, political, economic, and environmental realities; excavates some of the deep structures of thought that have contributed to their emergence and shaped their development; and provides a careful elucidation of an immanental perspective, one that might provide a way forward in reimagining the relationship between humans and nature. -- Andrew Murphy * Political Thought *
American Immanence teaches us how to encounter failures as demands for renewal...it exemplifies what it promotes: an audacious hope in the capacities of the human imagination. -- Lisa Landoe Hedrick, University of Chicago Divinity School * American Journal of Theology and Philosophy *
An original and substantial contribution to both contemporary political theology and American philosophical theology...e a remarkable achievement. -- Demian Wheeler, United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities * Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture *
Hogue's book makes an important contribution to the task of disrupting and demystifying the dominant symbolic complexes that have shaped the collective emotions and habits of contemporary America. * Process Studies *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction
1. American Exceptionalism and the Redeemer Symbolic
2. The Anthropocene and Climate Wickedness
3. Thinking, Feeling, and Valuing Immanence: American Immanental Philosophies
4. Divining Immanence: American Immanental Theologies
5. Toward a Theopolitics of Resilient Democracy
Notes
Bibliography
Index
