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Making nature sacred : literature, religion, and environment in America from the Puritans to the present / John Gatta.

By: Publication details: New York : Oxford University Press, 2004.Description: xii, 291 p. : ill. ; 24 cmISBN:
  • 0195165055 (cloth : acidfree paper)
  • 0195165063 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subject(s): DDC classification:
  • 810.9/36 22
LOC classification:
  • PS163 .G37 2004
Contents:
1. Landfall: The New World as New Creation -- Hayle Holly Land -- From William Bradford's "hideous and desolate wilderness" to Cotton Mather's Sacred Geography -- Thomas Morton's Idol Experiment: Nature Religion in New Canaan. 2. Meditating on the Creatures in Early American Life and Letters -- Visible Wonders of the Invisible World -- Anne Bradstreet's Meditations on the Creatures -- Ethical Views of "Brute Creation": William Bartram and John Woolman. 3. Intimations of an Environmental Ethic in Writings of Jonathan Edwards -- From Edwards to Aldo Leopold -- Sacred Grounds of Leopold's Land Ethic -- YES! in Thunder -- The Divine Beauty of Creation -- From Aesthetics to Environmental Ethics: The Nature of True Virtue applied to Nature. 4. "Revelation to US": Green Shoots of Romantic Religion in Antebellum America -- Surveying the Field -- From Reading Nature's Book to Worshipping in God's First Temple: Bryant and Cooper -- Emerson's Nature -- From Commodity to Cosmos -- Revelation to US: The Primacy of Experience -- Reshaping Nature. 5. Variations on Nature: From the Old Manse to the White Whale -- Hawthorne's Recovery of Eden -- Secret Gardens: Women's Plot, Women's Work -- God's Grassy Handkerchief, Walt Whitman's World --"Heartless voids and immensities": The Inscrutable Nature of Moby-Dick. 6. "Rare and Delectable Places": Thoreau's Imagination of Sacred Space at Walden -- Spirits of Concord -- Active and Contemplative Religion -- Sandbank Visions of Numinous Evolution. 7. Post-Darwinian Visions of Divine Creation -- Beyond Deicidal Darwinism -- Godliness Writ Large in John Muir's Sierra -- Earthspirits of Other Peoples in Mary Austin and Black Elk -- Rachel Carson's Reverence for Hidden Pools of Life. 8. Imagined Worlds: The Lure of Numinous Exoticism -- Swamp Spirits of African America -- Discerning the Invisible Landscape in Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams -- Seeking the Unseen Snow Leopard -- God, Satan, and Uncle Sam in the Everglades. 9. Reclaiming the Sacred Commons -- The Gifted Land of Wendell Berry -- Annie Dillard's Interrogation of Creation -- Paradise Regained in Suburbia: John Cheever's Fable of Beasley's Pond -- The Undomesticated Ecology of Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping. 10. Learning to Love Creation: The Religious Tenor of Contemporary Ecopoetry -- Religious Features of "the secular pilgrimage" -- Poetry of Sabbath Spaces -- Love for "all of it" -- Beyond Humanism toward Reverence: the Beauty of Unknowing.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [247]-282) and index.

1. Landfall: The New World as New Creation -- Hayle Holly Land -- From William Bradford's "hideous and desolate wilderness" to Cotton Mather's Sacred Geography -- Thomas Morton's Idol Experiment: Nature Religion in New Canaan. 2. Meditating on the Creatures in Early American Life and Letters -- Visible Wonders of the Invisible World -- Anne Bradstreet's Meditations on the Creatures -- Ethical Views of "Brute Creation": William Bartram and John Woolman. 3. Intimations of an Environmental Ethic in Writings of Jonathan Edwards -- From Edwards to Aldo Leopold -- Sacred Grounds of Leopold's Land Ethic -- YES! in Thunder -- The Divine Beauty of Creation -- From Aesthetics to Environmental Ethics: The Nature of True Virtue applied to Nature. 4. "Revelation to US": Green Shoots of Romantic Religion in Antebellum America -- Surveying the Field -- From Reading Nature's Book to Worshipping in God's First Temple: Bryant and Cooper -- Emerson's Nature -- From Commodity to Cosmos -- Revelation to US: The Primacy of Experience -- Reshaping Nature. 5. Variations on Nature: From the Old Manse to the White Whale -- Hawthorne's Recovery of Eden -- Secret Gardens: Women's Plot, Women's Work -- God's Grassy Handkerchief, Walt Whitman's World --"Heartless voids and immensities": The Inscrutable Nature of Moby-Dick. 6. "Rare and Delectable Places": Thoreau's Imagination of Sacred Space at Walden -- Spirits of Concord -- Active and Contemplative Religion -- Sandbank Visions of Numinous Evolution. 7. Post-Darwinian Visions of Divine Creation -- Beyond Deicidal Darwinism -- Godliness Writ Large in John Muir's Sierra -- Earthspirits of Other Peoples in Mary Austin and Black Elk -- Rachel Carson's Reverence for Hidden Pools of Life. 8. Imagined Worlds: The Lure of Numinous Exoticism -- Swamp Spirits of African America -- Discerning the Invisible Landscape in Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams -- Seeking the Unseen Snow Leopard -- God, Satan, and Uncle Sam in the Everglades. 9. Reclaiming the Sacred Commons -- The Gifted Land of Wendell Berry -- Annie Dillard's Interrogation of Creation -- Paradise Regained in Suburbia: John Cheever's Fable of Beasley's Pond -- The Undomesticated Ecology of Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping. 10. Learning to Love Creation: The Religious Tenor of Contemporary Ecopoetry -- Religious Features of "the secular pilgrimage" -- Poetry of Sabbath Spaces -- Love for "all of it" -- Beyond Humanism toward Reverence: the Beauty of Unknowing.

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