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This paper presents a juxtaposition of the understanding of objects in Jean-Luc Nancy’s postdeconstructive realism and Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology, particularly with reference to their respective notions of touch. Nancy incorporates a tension between the phenomenological accounts of touch and embodiment given by Merleau-Ponty, who focuses on the relationality of the flesh, and Levinas, who focuses more on non-relational alterity. Furthermore, Nancy does not accept the anthropocentric assumptions whereby phenomenology accounts for objects insofar as they correlate to human existence. Following the deconstruction of sovereign humanity, Nancy approaches what Derrida calls “post-deconstructive realism,” accounting for touch with regard to the relationality and alterity of all objects, human and nonhuman. However, abjuring the metaphysical interiority posited by panpsychists, Nancy admits that his philosophy cannot account for the discrete, atomistic differences between beings. Graham Harman agrees with much of Nancy’s philosophy, but he criticizes Nancy on this point, offering a corrective supplement in the form of his object-oriented ontology, which avoids panpsychism while nonetheless accounting for the discrete differences between objects.

Presenting a phenomenological realism of religious experience, this chapter elucidates the function of the epoche in the phenomenology of religion. Some interpretations of the epoche preclude any commitments to realism. For instance, Husserl’s epoche is typically understood as a methodological device for “bracketing” any assertions about the real world. Drawing on the works of Emmanuel Levinas and the Dutch phenomenologist of religion Gerardus van der Leeuw, I outline a different interpretation of the epoche, one that affirms the reality of religious experience in terms of hospitable restraint that makes contact with the irreducible hiddenness or alterity of others. The epoche thus involves a tactful touch that leaves the other intact. Following Heidegger’s existential turn in phenomenology, van der Leeuw and Levinas seek to live the epoche so that it is not a mere methodological device but a prereflective and religious mode of being fundamental to all human endeavor. The dynamic of touching that makes contact while leaving the other intact also resonates with the speculative realism of thinkers like Jean-Luc Nancy and Graham Harman. In a phenomenological realism, the epoche can assist efforts to clarify the historical and material conditions that make up religious experience while also affirming the real existence of religious experience through hospitality to irreducible alterity.

This article focuses on three examples of religious considerations of plants, with specific attention to the uselessness of plants. Drawing on Christian and Daoist sources, the examples include the following: (1) the lilies of the field described by Jesus in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, (2) the useless tree of Zhuangzi, and (3) Martin Heidegger&rsquo, s reading of a mystic poet influenced by Meister Eckhart, Angelus Silesius, for whom a rose blooms &ldquo, without why,&rdquo, which resonates with Heidegger&rsquo, s deconstruction (Destruktion) of the history of metaphysics and his interpretation of uselessness in Zhuangzi. Each of those examples involves non-anthropocentric engagements with the uselessness of plants, which is not to say that they are completely free of the anthropocentrically scaled perspectives that assimilate uselessness into the logistics of agricultural societies. In contrast to ethical theories of the intrinsic value (biocentrism) or systemic value (ecocentrism) of plants, these Christian and Daoist perspectives converge with ecological deconstruction in suggesting that ethical encounters with plants emerge through attention to their uselessness. A viable response to planetary emergency can emerge with the radical passivity of effortless action, which is a careless care that finds solidarity with the carefree ways of plants.

This article draws on three ecofeminist theorists (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Val Plumwood, and Donna Haraway) in order to criticize the dominant model of globalization, which oppresses humans and the natural environment, and propose an alternative globalization grounded in planetary love. Rather than affirming or opposing the globalization, planetary love acknowledges its complicity with the neocolonial tendencies of globalization while aiming toward another globalization, a more just, peaceful, and sustainable globalization. In this context, love is characterized by non-coercive, mutually transformative contact, which opens spaces of respect and responsibility for the unique differences and otherness of planetary subjects (humans and nonhumans).

This essay presents some points of dialogue between process thinking and post-structuralism, particularly in light of the metaphysical cosmology of Alfred North Whitehead and the post-structuralist philosophies of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida. This dialogue facilitates the emergence of a cosmological postmodernism. Through the creation of concepts that situate the human within the networks, processes, and mutually constitutive restions of the cosmos, cosmo logical postmodernism re-envisions the worldview of modernity and overcomes its reification and dichotomization of the human and the world. Four concepts that Whitehead, Deleuze, and Derrida contribute to a cosmological postmodernism include "event," "creativity," "rhizome," and "chaosmos."

This essay is an articulation of various contributions to anthropocosmic environmental ethics—an approach to environmental ethics emerging within the study of religion and ecology. In an anthropocosmic approach to environmental ethics, humans are intimately intertwined with the environment. Rather than placing value on a particular center (e. g., anthropocentric, biocentric, ecocentric) and thus excluding and marginalizing something of peripheral value, an anthropocosmic approach to ethics seeks to facilitate the mutual implication of humanity and the natural world, thereby affirming the interconnectedness and mutual constitution of central and peripheral value. Although the adjective "anthropocosmic" may seem obscure or vague, an examination of the genealogy of the term, beginning with its appearance in the works of Mircea Eliade, discloses numerous resources that have important contributions to make to the development of viable environmental ethics.