This edited collection represents an ongoing conversation for bringing healing cultures into suffering and evil. The pluralistic perspectives emerge from the creativity of this unique community of interpreters.

Suffering and Evil in Nature: Comparative Responses from Ecstatic Naturalism and Healing Cultures, edited by Joseph E. Harroff and Jea Sophia Oh, provides many unique experiments in thinking through the implications of ecstatic naturalism. This collection of essays directly addresses the importance of values sustaining cultures of healing and offers a variety of perspectives inducing radical hope requisite for cultivating moral and political imaginings of democracy-to-come as a regulative ideal. Through its invocation of “healing cultures,” the collection foregrounds the significance of the active, gerundive, and processual nature of ecstatic naturalism as a creative horizon for realizing values of intersubjective flourishing, while also highlighting the significance of culture as an always unfinished project of making discursive, interpretive and ethical space open for the subaltern and voiceless. Each contribution gives voice to the tensions and contradictions felt by living participants in emergent communities of interpretation—namely those who risk replacing authoritarian tendencies and fascist prejudices with a faith in future-oriented archetypes of healing to make possible truth and reconciliation between oppressor and oppressed, victimizers and victims of violence and trauma. These essays then let loose the radical hope of healing from suffering in a ceaseless community of communication within a horizon of creative democratic interpretation.

Foreword

Robert S. Corrington

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Joseph E. Harroff and Jea Sophia Oh

Part 1: A Deep Opening of Nothingness: Some Metaphysical Resoundings

1. Providence and Providingness: On Platonic and Ecstatic Naturalist Good, Evil, and Infinity

Marilynn Lawrence

2. The Experience of Values and the Possibility of Ordinal Phenomenology in Corrington’s Deep Pantheism

J. Edward Hackett

3. Dwelling with the Deep Ones: Lovecraftian Horror and the Selving Process

Thomas Millary

Part 2: Facing Suffering and Violence: Ecstatic Difference and Educational Healing

4. On Being Sunk?

Desmond Coleman

5. Racism, Religious Education and Transformation

Moon Son and Ji Young Park

6. A Phenomenological Study of Feminist Political Consciousness

Susan Erck

Part 3: Ecological World Horizons: Comparative Philosophy and Relational Responding

7. Recapturing World-Loyalty: A Relational Response to Ecological Violence

Katelynn E. Carver

8. Fecundity and Healing of the Great Mother Reading Corrington’s Nature and Nothingness via Yin-Yang Thinking

Jea Sophia Oh

Part 4: Nurturing Nature and Posthumanism

9. Evil as Human Resistance to the Indifferent Force of the Primal Nature: An Essay on Story-Telling Animals

Iljoon Park

10. The Posthuman and an Advaya Dialectic of Sacrifice

Ick-Sang Shin

11. Education for the Symbiosis of Humans and Machines in a Post-Human Age

Eunkyoung Lee

Part 5: (A)theodicy through the Anthropocene

12. Selving in a Dangerous World: William James, Buddhism, and Ecstatic Naturalism

Jonathan Weidenbaum

13. Redemptive Suffering with Tianming 天命: An Ecstatically Naturalist Reading of Sacred Selving in Confucian Ethics

Joseph Harroff

14. We Have Met the Enemy, and He is Us: The Nature of Evil and the Evil of Nature in the Anthropocene

Robert King