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Since colonial times, the sense of encountering an unseen, transcendental Presence within the natural world has been a characteristic motif in American literature and culture. American writers have repeatedly perceived in nature something beyond itself-and beyond themselves. In this book, JohnGatta argues that the religious import of American environmental literature has yet to be fully recognized or understood. Whatever their theology, American writers have perennially construed the nonhuman world to be a source, in Rachel Carson's words, of something that takes us out of ourselves.Making Nature Sacred explores how the quest for natural revelation has been pursued through successive phases of American literary and intellectual history. And it shows how the imaginative challenge of reading landscapes has been influenced by biblical hermeneutics. Though focused onadaptations of Judeo-Christian religious traditions, it also samples Native American, African American, and Buddhist forms of ecospirituality. It begins with Colonial New England writers such Anne Bradstreet and Jonathan Edwards, re-examines pivotal figures such as Henry Thoreau and John Muir, andtakes account of writings by Mary Austin, Rachel Carson, and many others along the way. The book concludes with an assessment of the spiritual renaissance underway in current environmental writing, as represented by five noteworthy poets and by authors such as Wendell Berry, Annie Dillard,Marilynne Robinson, Peter Matthiessen, and Barry Lopez. This engaging study should appeal not only to students of literature, but also to those interested in ethics and environmental studies, religious studies, and American cultural history. Intro -- Contents -- Introduction -- 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" in Two Quakers: William Bartram and John Woolman -- 3. Intimations of an Environmental Ethic in the 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.
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