A few weeks back, I posted that my friend Blake Hereth and I had just submitted the manuscript for an edited collection to our press. It took a few weeks for us to finalize the title with the press, who initially preferred to go with a title that we thought was a bit bland. But we heard officially that they’re going to let us call the volume
The Lost Sheep in Philosophy of Religion:
New Perspectives on Disability, Gender, Race, and Animals
The volume was initially conceived in the summer of 2016, growing from dissatisfaction with the state of contemporary philosophy of religion. Both of us had complained about how certain voices and topics were often excluded from discussion. So in October 2016, Blake asked me about the possibility of putting together a volume that would not only cover underrepresented topics, but one that would also actively promote work done by philosophers from underrepresented groups. As we put it in our introduction, “The Lost Sheep seeks to make philosophy of religion even more diverse than it has been, by welcoming into the fold topics and perspectives that previously have been marginal.”
Contemporary philosophy of religion, in our view, is overly narrow in a number of ways. One kind of narrowness is those contributing to the field. Philosophers of religion are overwhelmingly Christian, overwhelmingly male, and even more overwhelmingly white. Contemporary analytic philosophy in general has begun paying more attention to diversity in recent years. But philosophy of religion lags behind this general trend.
Given these forms of narrowness, we think philosophy of religion would benefit from widening or diversification in a number of ways—by bringing more sheep into the fold. And that’s what the volume seeks to do.
Here’s the list of authors and their topics that will be included in the volume:
- Nicholas Wolterstorff, Forward
- Kevin Timpe and Blake Hereth, Introduction
- Helen De Cruz, “Philosophy of Religion from the Margins: A Theoretical Analysis and Focus Group Study”
- Michelle Panchuk, “That We May Be Whole: Doing Philosophy of Religion with the Whole Self”
- Kirk Lougheed, “Epistemic Injustice and Religious Experience”
- Joshua Cockayne, “Smelling God: Olfaction as Religious Experience”
- Joshua Blanchard, “‘Not My People’: Jewish-Christian Ethics and Divine Reversals in Response to Injustice”
- Dustin Crummett, “Eschatology for Creeping Things (and Other Animals)”
- Faith Glavey Pawl, “Exploring Theological Zoology: Might Nonhuman Animals be Spiritual (but not Religious)?”
- Blake Hereth, “Animal Gods”
- David Efird, “The Resurrection of the Minority Body: Physical Disability in the Life of Heaven”
- Kevin Timpe, “Disabled Beatitude”
- Scott M. Williams, “When Personhood Goes Wrong in Ethics and Philosophical Theology:Disability, Ableism, and (Modern) Personhood”
- Eric T. Yang and Stephen T. Davis, “Marriage, Reproduction, and the Incarnation: What Could Jesus Do?”
- Kelli D. Potter, “A Transfeminist Critique of Mormon Theologies of Gender”
- Hilary Yancey, “Heavenly (Gendered) Bodies? Gender Persistence in the Resurrection and Its Implications”
- David Worsley, “Limbo, Hiddenness, and the Beatific Vision (And Procreation, For Some, in the Life to Come)”
- Sameer Yadav, “Religious Racial Formation Theory and its Metaphysics: A Research Program in the Philosophy of Religion”
The Lost Sheep will enter the copyediting stage in the next two to three weeks, and should be out before the end of the year. Routledge has a page for the book already here.
