ABSTRACT
A case study can help to grasp the intellectual territory at the junction of transreligious theology and religious naturalism. With that in mind, this chapter asks how a transreligious theology that is simultaneously naturalist in orientation might approach the topic of love and desire. The central argument is that the emerging scientific account of love and desire can be rendered so as to resist invidious reductionism while engaging the religiously potent depths of nature, thereby contributing to an interpretation of love and desire that is both transreligious and scientifically grounded. Beginning with human love and desire, where science has a strong grip and effectively constrains and inspires theological accounts of human nature, the argument travels downwards into the depths of the natural reality that includes love and desire as some of its emergent products. What shows up for human beings with regard to love and desire is one kind of guide to the axiological depth structures and flows of nature. Scientific inquiry and critical theory are other kinds of guides. Love and desire have theological potency not because they were in some sense always there, within a creator God or any kind of natural entelechy, but because they emerge without collusion or design within the biocultural realm as a sign and an instance of the potent axiological possibilities in the very depths of nature. In this interpretation, there is no evading responsibility for the all-too-human construction of norms to manage love and desire. Nor is there any dimming of the luminous possibilities that lie before us. We can choose what love and desire will mean for our behavior and self-understanding, constrained but never determined by biocultural givens, and inspired by pictures of an ever more just and verdant world.
