How can we live in harmony with the universe, and not just in it? What is it to feel at home in the world? 'Negative Natural Theology' engages with sites in contemporary thinking, where the concept of the divine beckons, or looms, but also, perhaps, repels, or hides. It asks 'what is at stake' in the decision (if it is that) to talk about God and the divine, or not to do so, with a wide and deep curiosity about what this might include: reasons and arguments, certainly, but also more biographical, intuitive, and affective dimensions, including imagination, and feelings about what is valuable. Also relevant are unconscious drives and factors, and undercurrents of motivation and yearning. Concepts can convince, or fail to convince, but, also, they can attract and repel. The book draws on theology, anthropology, literature, and philosophy, engaging with analytical and continental post-Kantian sources, and treating individual thinkers such as Immanuel Kant, William James, Carl Jung, Josiah Royce, Karl Rahner, Albert Camus, Saul Kripke, Thomas Nagel, Derek Parfit, Tanya Luhrmann, Mathew Engelke, Karen Kilby, Judith Wolfe, and Janet Soskice, as well as cultural movements such as modern paganism, new atheism, and humanism. 'Natural theology' involves speaking about God, using the resources of 'reason alone'. 'Negative theology' is concerned with the ways in which some types of reasoning might run out, without this necessarily being an ending. Negative Natural Theology involves thinking about God, in the light of, and under the shadow of, limits, tensions, and fragmentations in our lives, with the question of what is at stake never far from the surface.

Philosophy, Theology, Psychology