dc.creator | Dean, Dorothy Chappell | |
dc.date.accessioned | 2020-08-21T21:04:39Z | |
dc.date.available | 2020-03-26 | |
dc.date.issued | 2018-03-26 | |
dc.identifier.uri | https://etd.library.vanderbilt.edu/etd-02282018-100925 | |
dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/1803/10645 | |
dc.description.abstract | This dissertation constructs a theological anthropology for ecofeminist theology. In spite of their insistence that human beings need to feel “at home on the earth,” ecofeminists have not developed a theological anthropology that explicitly counteracts human exceptionalism. Without such an anthropology, the distancing conceptions of the human being that contributed to the ecological crisis are not fully challenged. I propose a conscious turn to a focus on matter as a means by which ecofeminist theology can achieve nonexceptionalist anthropology. I draw from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of visible and invisible “flesh” to construct a theological anthropology that accounts not only for human bodies but also for human cognition and experiences of transcendence in a way that does not differentiate us absolutely from the material world. Specifically, I use Merleau-Ponty’s figure of the chiasm to construct an “apophatic anthropology” in which the boundary between self and world is fundamentally indeterminate. I argue that this anthropology is more conducive to an ecologically sound relationship with the world because it cultivates a mode of seeing ourselves as entirely continuous with material reality and enables us to live into our embodied interconnection. | |
dc.format.mimetype | application/pdf | |
dc.subject | schleiermacher | |
dc.subject | nonexceptionalism | |
dc.subject | exceptionalism | |
dc.subject | affect | |
dc.subject | environmental ethics | |
dc.subject | experience | |
dc.subject | inscendence | |
dc.subject | apophatic anthropology | |
dc.subject | chiasm | |
dc.subject | radical theology | |
dc.subject | mcfague | |
dc.subject | anthropocene | |
dc.subject | ecotheology | |
dc.subject | ecofeminism | |
dc.title | A New Anthropology for Ecotheology: Rethinking the Human in the World with Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Flesh | |
dc.type | dissertation | |
dc.contributor.committeeMember | Kelly Oliver | |
dc.contributor.committeeMember | Laurel Schneider | |
dc.contributor.committeeMember | Paul Dehart | |
dc.type.material | text | |
thesis.degree.name | PHD | |
thesis.degree.level | dissertation | |
thesis.degree.discipline | Religion | |
thesis.degree.grantor | Vanderbilt University | |
local.embargo.terms | 2020-03-26 | |
local.embargo.lift | 2020-03-26 | |
dc.contributor.committeeChair | Ellen Armour | |