Book Launch
Encountering Earth: Thinking Theologically With a More-Than-Human-World
Co-edited by: Tim Harvie
September 27th, 2018
5:00pm-7:00pm
Heritage Centre Link
St. Mary’s University Campus
Animal studies has built upon the emphasis of Jacques Derrida in articulating the particularity of concrete encounters with other animals. Animal theorist Donna Haraway notes that this primarily occurs through personal narratives, but no scholarly volume exploring personal narratives of encounter with the non-human world previously existed. This book recounts autobiographical narratives of encounter in order to explore the embodied, affective trajectories possible in animal religious studies. In dialogue with Aristotle and Martin Buber, my presentation narrates the challenge of beginning a life with a traumatized pup and how the pup’s own initiative established a liturgical practice that emphasized the relational, the transcendental, and the intersubjective possibilities of ethics with other species.