Who’s Afraid Of Pantheism?

Clayton J. Crocket at Marginalia Review:

In this book, she explores the history of intellectual discussions of pantheism, and raises questions about why so many Western philosophers and theologians have resisted this concept. Pantheism is combined of two Greek words, pan—which means ‘all’—and theism, which consists of belief in God. Here All is God, or God is All. In most of Western thought, pantheism functions as a limit concept. That is, if we want to think about or have faith in a divinity, it needs to be related to the world, the all or everything, but pantheism names the collapse of this God into everything else to the extent that there is nothing that is not God.

One way to characterize Western religious thought is the resistance to pantheism. Rubenstein mines this resistance, and offers new ways to think about pantheism and even pantheology.

more here.