Pantheologies

Mary-Jane Rubenstein is professor of religion; feminist, gender, and sexuality studies; and science in society at Wesleyan University. She is the author of Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe(Columbia, 2009) and Worlds Without End: The Many Lives of the Multiverse (Columbia, 2014) and the coeditor of Entangled Worlds: Religion, Science, and New Materialisms (with Catherine Keller, 2017).Mary-Jane Rubenstein is professor of religion; feminist, gender, and sexuality studies; and science in society at Wesleyan University. She is the author of Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe (Columbia, 2009) and Worlds Without End: The Many Lives of the Multiverse (Columbia, 2014) and the coeditor of Entangled Worlds: Religion, Science, and New Materialisms (with Catherine Keller, 2017).

Catherine Keller, author of Political Theology of the Earth: Our Planetary Emergency and the Struggle for a New Public:
It is not out of charity or historicism that Mary-Jane Rubenstein channels this maligned, misunderstood, and mangled legacy. No, there is something in the pan of theism that our Anthropocene mess of a species (its atheists and its theologians included) needs. Now. Mesmerized by the brilliant weave of Pantheologies’ irresistible irony, gorgeous prose, and holographic erudition, readers will be hooked by a mystery too suspenseful in its plotline and too urgent in its intersections to set aside.

Nancy Frankenberry, editor of The Faith of Scientists: In Their Own Words:
In Pantheologies, Mary-Jane Rubenstein answers the old problem of the One and the Many by offering a resolute triumph of the Many over the One. Give Rubenstein a One—any one—and she will make a Many out of it. I applaud this temperament, as William James called it, and the intuition that it generates and reflects. Multiplicity, thy name is woman. Rubenstein will save us every time from the totalitarian tendencies of certain regions of process philosophy, from the Teutonic idealisms of post-Hegelian theologies, even from the totalizing forms of monistic pantheisms.

Jane Bennett, author of Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things:
Pantheologies is an elegant and lively tour of pantheism and of the racialized gender panics it has prompted in Euro-American thought. I leave the book with the sense that the goat-god Pan is still roaming around, disrupting the either/ors of Western metaphysics and presenting a cosmos both more amazing and more discomfiting. Rubenstein has written an excellent book.