The Matter with Pantheism: On Shepherds and Goat-Gods and Mountains and Monsters

This chapter reflects critically upon the position that most straightforwardly aligns materiality and divinity: pantheism. First, the chapter diagnoses the nearly-universal denigration of this term among western theologians and philosophers as something like queer panic: a fear of the coincidence of categories that “ought” to be kept separate like God and dirt, spirit and matter, divinity and sexuality. Second, it sketches a conceptually viable “pantheism” by reanimating the “pan.” From the hills of Arcadia through the stable in Bethlehem to a New Jersey suburb, we begin to glimpse a “multipantheology” that affirms the autopoetic, emergent, vibrantly material universe as what we mean by “God.”