Michael Hogue

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Response to My ReadersMichael S. Hogue (bio)I. IntroductionI often begin writing for personal reasons: to slow my thinking, clarify and organize my thoughts, trace ideas, and sort concepts. Generally, a concern for something I consider wrong about the world motivates me to write. Provoked by such a concern, I write to understand why and how what is wrong came to be that way and why and how I think it can or should be different. I write in reply to H. Richard Niebuhr's moral hermeneutic question, "What's going on?" And yet, while writing typically begins (for me) as a personal search for understanding, this search eventually leads me to (re) discover my formative communities of inquiry and interpretation. None of my questions or ideas, none of my orienting values, none of my interpretive impulses are mine alone. They do not, and cannot, exist independently of others' questions, ideas, values, and interpretations. To use Peirce's metaphor, they are slender fibers braided into a larger cable rather than independent links in a chain. The issues and questions that motivate my research; the topics I care about enough to develop into articles and books; the conceptual, critical, and normative vocabularies I bring to my research and writing; the intellectual traditions that shape the patterns of my thinking—none of these are strictly personal or individual. They have taken root and grown in me as I've learned with and from others. Writing reminds me that, as a person, I am a creature of relational processes because it shows me that my mind is not (exclusively) my own—what and how I think have been formed, animated, and limited by my experience with others in a larger world of experience that is broader and deeper than any individual mind.I open this brief essay with this comment to acknowledge my gratitude and indebtedness not only to the authors of the articles in this special issue (Walter Gulick, Robert Smid, John Teehan, and AJ Turner) but also to the larger community of scholars that comprise the readership of the American Journal of Theology and Philosophy (AJTP) and the Institute for American Religious and Philosophical Thought (IARPT). I attended my first IARPT (HIARPT, at the time) conference about seventeen years ago, soon after completing my Ph.D. I didn't know anyone personally then, but I knew several folks as authors of articles and books I had read in recent years. I discovered IARPT through the bibliography of Victor Anderson's book, Pragmatic Theology: Negotiating [End Page 80] the Intersections of an American Philosophy of Religion and Public Theology. I resonated with Anderson's articulation of a socially engaged public theology that drew from American pragmatist, historicist, and naturalist philosophies of religion. His mind had been where mine was going, into the dissenting tradition of American immanence, or the left wing of American radical theology, as I refer to it.While reading Anderson's book, I learned that many of the authors in his bibliography met every summer as a (relatively?) organized group of like-minded scholars. I joined them the next chance I had. And as things go with this group, I was immediately recruited to serve as the book review editor for the AJTP! Since that first meeting, I've attended as many IARPT meetings as my schedule allows, organized one of the summer conferences, served as AJTP book review editor for several years, and then served for several more years as the AJTP editor (following Michael Raposa's illustrious term!). Most recently, I was honored when Andrew Irvine and Austin Roberts made American Immanence a focus of the 2021 IARPT conference, "Political Thought and the Powers of Democracy: American Thought in the Anthropocene." Gulick's, Smid's, Teehan's, and Turner's articles began as papers for that conference.All this is to say what I have heard many others say through the years: the IARPT/AJTP community of interpretation has become a primary intellectual (and even spiritual) home for me. I am (and we are) fortunate to belong to a group of academic philosophers and theologians who collectively embody a rare (let us hope not...

Life can only be understood as an aim at that perfection which the conditions of its environment allow. For the pragmatist, the world’s saviors are immanent, multiple, and ordinary. “Man finds himself living in an aleatory world,” writes John Dewey, “his existence involves, to put it baldly, a gamble. The world is a scene of risk; it is uncertain, unstable, uncannily unstable.”3 This fundamental ambiguity is compounded by the distinct conditions of our late modern, globalizing, postsecular world. Amidst the conditions of this world, the religious meanings, purposes, and desires that have traditionally oriented human life are being relativized; the boundaries of our religious and moral traditions ..

The ecological crisis is one of the most critical moral concerns of the present. But the concern is not with the environment, or with that which surrounds us; it is not with an objectified nature, in relation to which humans stand as mere passive observers. Rather, ecological concern emerges from recognition that humanity participates in nature, that our behavior in the natural world affects our own present and future as well as the present and future of the biosphere and that we are morally answerable for this behavior, or responsible in, through, and for our participation.1 Understood in these ways, the ecological crisis can be viewed as an unfolding historical process generated by the structural forms and ..

In Science and Religious Anthropology: A Spiritually Evocative Naturalist Interpretation of Human Life, Wesley J. Wildman has awakened work in religious anthropology to a new day and a new kind of light. No one who works in religious anthropology, or in religion and science studies more generally, should be taken seriously who has not read, digested, and contended with Wildman’s work. Indeed, if one is looking for an education in genuine interdisciplinarity, in rigorous scholarly analysis and argumentation, and in the ways in which academic theology, religious studies, and the scientific study of religion can mutually inform one another, Wildman’s book is the ideal school. Wildman carefully analyzes, creatively ..