A Philosophy of Sacred Nature introduces Robert Corrington's philosophical thought, "ecstatic naturalism," which seeks to recognize nature's self-transforming potential. Ecstatic naturalism is a philosophical-theological perspective, deeply seated in a semiotic cosmology and psychosemiosis, and it radically and profoundly probes into the mystery of nature's perennial self-fissuring of nature natured and nature naturing. Edited by Leon Niemoczynski and Nam T. Nguyen, this collection aims to allow readers to see what can be done with ecstatic naturalism, and what directions, interpretations, and creative uses that doing can take. A thorough exploration of the prospects of ecstatic naturalism, this book will appeal to scholars of Continental philosophy, religious naturalism, and American pragmatism.

This book is the examination of Corrington s thought called ecstatic naturalism in juxtaposition to C. S. Peirce s pragmatic and semiotic concept of the self and Karl Jaspers existential elucidation of Existenz. Peirce s and Jaspers anthropocentrism is corrected by Corrington s ecstatic naturalism. Ecstatic naturalism, as a new movement, is both a semiotic theoretical method and a metaphysics that probes deeply into the ontological divide between nature naturing and nature natured. Methodologically, ecstatic naturalism relies on two methods; namely, horizontal hermeneutics and ordinal phenomenology, which are applied to critique Peirce s and Jaspers anthropocentric concepts of the self. This book attempts to achieve three goals: first, to present and elucidate the underlying philosophical concepts of Charles Peirce, Karl Jaspers, and Robert Corrington; second, to critique the anthropocentric self of Peirce s semiotic pragmatism and of Jaspers existential anthropology (periechontology) from the standpoint of ecstatic naturalism; and third, to introduce the concept of nature s primal self, radically grounded in the perspective of ecstatic naturalism, as a judicious, more encompassing, and richer framework compared to Peirce s semiotic construction of the self and Jaspers existential concept of Existenz.