Comparative Methods in Spatial Approaches to Religion

Recently, a number of methods for re-thinking ideas as part of the rest of the natural world (including religious ideas and values) have appeared on the religious studies landscape. Notions of emergence theory, new materialisms, and object-oriented ontologies are geared toward thinking about religion and science, ideas and nature, values and matter from within what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari call a “single plane” of existence. Others within the field of “religion and ecology/nature” are skeptical of these “postmodern” methods and theories. These skeptics claim that ideas from various religious traditions such as pantheism, panentheism, animism, and even co-dependent arising already do the intellectual work of re-thinking “religion and nature” together onto an immanent plane of existence. This article will begin to explore some of the links and differences between older traditions of thinking immanence with more recent post-modern moves toward spatially-oriented ways of thinking. Rather than being a final reflection on these connections and differences, this article calls for a more sustained comparative study of these different spatial approaches.