Being-in-Creation Human Responsibility in an Endangered World [Hardcover]

What is the proper relationship between human beings and the more-than-human world? This philosophical question, which underlies vast environmental crises, forces us to investigate the tension between our extraordinary powers, which seem to set us apart from nature, even above it, and our thoroughgoing ordinariness, as revealed by the evolutionary history we share with all life.

The contributors to this volume ask us to consider whether the anxiety of unheimlichkeit, which in one form or another absorbed so much of twentieth-century philosophy, might reveal not our homelessness in the cosmos but a need for a fundamental belongingness and implacement in it.

Being in Creation asks about the role of humans in the more-than-human world from the perspective of human creatureliness, a perspective that accepts as a given human finitude and limitations, as well as responsibility toward other beings and toward the whole of which they are a part.Being-in-Creation, edited by Benson, Treanor, and Wirzba is a well-conceived and beautifully-executed collection of essays on a vitally important topic. In a situation of acute ecological crisis, we require the resources of all of our philosophical, theological and religious traditions, including the rich veins opened up for us here by the contributors, to offer us new ways of thinking about and living in the world.This is a marvelous collection of essays with immense creative potential. Indeed, Being-in-Creation is opening up the doors of continental philosophy to shape a rich ecological theology. A groundbreaking contribution!