Globalization and climate weirding are two of the leading phenomena that challenge and change the way we need to think and act within the planetary community. Modern Western understandings of human beings, animals, and the rest of the natural world and the subsequent technologies built on those understandings have thrown us into an array of social and ecological crises with planetary implications. Earthly Things: Immanence, New Materialisms, and Planetary Thinking, argues that more immanent or planetary ways of thinking and acting have great potential for re-thinking human-technology-animal-Earth relationships and for addressing problems of global climate weirding and other forms of ecological degradation. Older and often-marginalized forms of thought from animisms, shamanisms, and other religious traditions are joined by more recent forms of thinking with immanence such as the universe story, process thought, emergence theory, the new materialisms (NM’s), object-oriented ontologies (OOO’s), affect theory, and queer theory. This book maps out some of the connections and differences between immanent frameworks to provide some eco-intellectual commons for thinking within the planetary community, with a particular emphasis on making connections between more recent theories and older ideas of immanence found in many of the world’s religious traditions. The authors in this volume met and worked together over five years, so the resulting volume reveals sustained and multifaceted perspectives on “thinking and acting with the planet.”

This collection of poems is a follow up to Duckhorn's previous book entitled "Say Yes To Time". "Written Rhythms of Space Travel and Earthly Things" joins hands with the times urging us all to appreciate our soul as having a unique life of its own. She encapsulates the idea of space travel, making us light heartedly aware of the dangers in our cosmos. It could become an angry region and not favor us too much in the distant future. "Written Rhythms of Space Travel and Earthly Things" about sums this up and is a pensive read.

Daniel Call was a man who had it all. Born to newly converted Christians, his father was a full professor in physics and an early creator of software that changed the computer world and made the family billionaires. Daniel himself was a genius that spoke several languages at an early age. But Daniel had a secret. At age four, he was visited by the angel Gabriel who told him he would be a man that would change the world. At age twelve, he was again visited by Gabriel and performed his first miracle, one witnessed by a reporter from a major newspaper, a miracle that for a brief time made headlines. Due to the work of the family lawyer, Daniel was able to settle back into obscurity until the age of eighteen when his parents were tragically killed in a plane crash. Orphaned, he was introduced as the world's most eligible bachelor by People Magazine. Worth nearly two billion dollars, he was tall, handsome, and a noted genius. For several months his face dominated tabloid journalism. He then stunned the world by giving most of his money away to charity and taking vows of abstinence and chastity. Daniel, however, had never forgotten the early visits from Gabriel and was determined to prepare himself for whatever lay ahead. He moved quietly to Boone, North Carolina, where he attended classes at Appalachian State and Wake Forest Universities. Suddenly, three years later, Gabriel reappeared and the miracles began that would shake the world. Many of these miracles were captured on live television and fed the mid 1990's newly founded cable news networks and fueled a fresh avalanche of tabloid and hard printed news. Daniel led a "walking" crusade that covered thousands of miles where he was followed by tens of thousands of people. He had an inner core of followers that began to be called his disciples. Meanwhile the forces of evil conspired with many in the established faiths to discredit and destroy Daniel. As these forces gained strength, Daniel began to change his ministry, spending more time alone as he prepared for the end and sending out disciples to do their own miracles and teaching. God's power was soon revealed in a way that left few doubters, a stunning last miracle that showed the power of God, and His judgment and infinite mercy. Daniel's final legacy would not be in the miracles, but in the changes that a life lived in denial of self would cause.

“Bassett at last provides a path to understand better the specifically Aztec characteristics of the teteoh and their ritual ‘embodiments.’” —Ethnohistory Following their first contact in 1519, accounts of Aztecs identifying Spaniards as gods proliferated. But what exactly did the Aztecs mean by a “god” (teotl), and how could human beings become gods or take on godlike properties? This sophisticated, interdisciplinary study analyzes three concepts that are foundational to Aztec religion—teotl (god), teixiptla (localized embodiment of a god), and tlaquimilolli (sacred bundles containing precious objects)—to shed new light on the Aztec understanding of how spiritual beings take on form and agency in the material world. In The Fate of Earthly Things, Molly Bassett draws on ethnographic fieldwork, linguistic analyses, visual culture, and ritual studies to explore what ritual practices such as human sacrifice and the manufacture of deity embodiments (including humans who became gods), material effigies, and sacred bundles meant to the Aztecs. She analyzes the Aztec belief that wearing the flayed skin of a sacrificial victim during a sacred rite could transform a priest into an embodiment of a god or goddess, as well as how figurines and sacred bundles could become localized embodiments of gods. Without arguing for unbroken continuity between the Aztecs and modern speakers of Nahuatl, Bassett also describes contemporary rituals in which indigenous Mexicans who preserve costumbres (traditions) incorporate totiotzin (gods) made from paper into their daily lives. This research allows us to understand a religious imagination that found life in death and believed that deity embodiments became animate through the ritual binding of blood, skin, and bone.

This broad interdisciplinary and comparative study of the ways in which we discursively "make" the world and its things aims to go beyond the "poetic thinking" of Heidegger toward a more pragmatic way of interpreting concrete social, cultural, and political experience. The book outlines three constitutive functions of world-making. Endowing signifies the direct provision of the "wherewithal" that must come into being if anything else is to come into being. Enabling develops or facilitates what is endowed; it is a kind of education in being-in-the-world. Entitling embraces the realm of justice and decision; it concerns what is right for human beings to have and do and be. Placing these functions in contemporary contexts, the book offers as an alternative some perspectives of American pragmatism (Dewey, Peirce, James, Mead, Buchler) and Continental philosophy (Arendt, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Husserl, Barthes, Gramsci). The book closely examines the thinking of Hobbes, Descartes, Vico, Calderón, and Jefferson and several literary figures and thinkers (Yeats, Emerson, Hopkins, Baudelaire, Pascal, Rilke, Frost, Brecht). Throughout, the book investigates and questions the tradition of possessive individualism interpreted by modern scholars, notably Pocock. The book is in five parts. Part I argues a need to move beyond deconstructing toward reconstructing. Part II considers the interactions of endowing, enabling, and entitling. In Part III, the author explores the ways in which discourse works in the Cartesian discourse of reason, and the phenomenon of Manifest Destiny as rendered by Frost. The focus of Part IV is incorporating, which builds on Merleau-Ponty's concept of flesh, or the process by which the body acts and becomes fully worldly. Part V addresses the phenomena of experience in a variety of modes, including the role of story and natality, experimental theater, the epistolary novel, and representations of the heroic Lucretia. A postscript, exploring the "conclusion" with which scholarly books typically end, offers a perspectivist reading of the final text, Emerson's "Experience."

The Olivet Discourse sounds a bit stodgy to some—too scholarly for other people. Well, imagine if you had a private tutor (who also happened to be a best-selling author) who would sit down with you over a cup of coffee and explain Christ’s words in everyday language. That’s exactly what Ray Stedman has done, bringing the mysterious realm of end-times theology down-to-earth. In 13 chapters, you’ll explore the prophetic words of Matthew 24 and 25 in a whole new way.

A resourceful and thorough study of an important issue in New Testament and systematic theology, this book is one that takes human action and reception into full account. Where does God's revelation reside--in the event or in the interpretation? If history is about the creation of meaning, what does it mean to say that God reveals God's self in history? Dan Via addresses these and related issues in this original volume.