ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a theological meditation on our assumptions about God and nature. The ontological parity that the author argues for establishes religious naturalism in which all things are equally real. The author frames the tension between transcendence and immanence with the philosophical debates between medieval philosophers, the debut of the Cartesian interior self which separated the mind from nature and subsumed God to an idea in the mind. These familiar historical moments are enhanced and summarized in a discussion of Charles Taylor’s distinction between the pre-modern “porous self” and the contemporary “buffered self” in A Secular Age.
