Overview

The substance of this present work is liberation semiology. The world's own principle is love (agape). Our fellow creatures are co-symbols of emancipation from human violence. Creation is not, as influential modern thinkers envision, mere material, mere nature, to commodify and dominate for the freedom of an exclusive constituency of our species. The ecological crisis emerges from a tragic misfit between experiments with secular sovereignty and the continuance of Christian historicity. Either the Christian form of life (of time) is replaced, revealing a new ecological worldview, or we revive Christian sovereignty as a creative fit with the actuality of Christian historicity. This work wagers on the latter: Christian civilization is coextensive with ecological civilization.

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9781498291149

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Cramm masterfully argues that the root of the environmental crisis today is found in the Christian anthropological and soteriological disputes tracing back to the fifth century. The author nimbly guides his audience through the history of Western thought--discussing such giants as Augustine, Aquinas, and Descartes--to demonstrate that anxieties over environmental preservation are ultimately secularized forms of Christian anxieties over salvation. --Stuart Squires, Associate Professor of Theology and Associate Director of the Center for Faith and Culture, University of St. Thomas, Houston Craig Cramm's Radix Naturalis is a fascinating book. Its huge merit is that it addresses questions which needed to be asked but which, all too often, simply have not been. The environment is not a problem that came from nowhere; and our thinking about the environment and the relation of human beings to the natural world did not come from nowhere either. Cramm shows clearly the range and scope of the thinking that needs to be done to fully comprehend these matters: and he has gone a considerable way himself to do that thinking for us. For that I, for one, thank him. --James Connelly, Professor of Political Theory, University of Hull Cramm is an intellectual virtuoso, who can trace the ecological crisis back to Pelagius and found a new approach to the environment on Trinitarian semiotics. Communication according to Cramm is not, as nominalists would have it, a human act of labeling mute things, rather it is basic to being as such. It might have taken the Christian dogmas of the Trinity and the incarnation to reverse the Greek marginalization of the sign, but Cramm's semiotics is intended for a fully secular uptake, as we scramble to find intellectual resources to build an ecological civilization. Radix Naturalis is an important contribution to a literature only now beginning: philosophy of the environment in the Anthropocene. --Sean J. McGrath, Professor of Philosophy, Memorial University, and Co-Director of For a New Earth

Cramm masterfully argues that the root of the environmental crisis today is found in the Christian anthropological and soteriological disputes tracing back to the fifth century. The author nimbly guides his audience through the history of Western thought--discussing such giants as Augustine, Aquinas, and Descartes--to demonstrate that anxieties over environmental preservation are ultimately secularized forms of Christian anxieties over salvation. --Stuart Squires, Associate Professor of Theology and Associate Director of the Center for Faith and Culture, University of St. Thomas, Houston Craig Cramm's Radix Naturalis is a fascinating book. Its huge merit is that it addresses questions which needed to be asked but which, all too often, simply have not been. The environment is not a problem that came from nowhere; and our thinking about the environment and the relation of human beings to the natural world did not come from nowhere either. Cramm shows clearly the range and scope of the thinking that needs to be done to fully comprehend these matters: and he has gone a considerable way himself to do that thinking for us. For that I, for one, thank him. --James Connelly, Professor of Political Theory, University of Hull Cramm is an intellectual virtuoso, who can trace the ecological crisis back to Pelagius and found a new approach to the environment on Trinitarian semiotics. Communication according to Cramm is not, as nominalists would have it, a human act of labeling mute things, rather it is basic to being as such. It might have taken the Christian dogmas of the Trinity and the incarnation to reverse the Greek marginalization of the sign, but Cramm's semiotics is intended for a fully secular uptake, as we scramble to find intellectual resources to build an ecological civilization. Radix Naturalis is an important contribution to a literature only now beginning: philosophy of the environment in the Anthropocene. --Sean J. McGrath, Professor of Philosophy, Memorial University, and Co-Director of For a New Earth

Author Information

Craig Cramm is Adjunct Professor and Lecturer of Philosophy at Memorial University, St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada.

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