Review of Creaturely Theology -- Edited by Celia Deane-Drummond and David Clough
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Authors
Meyer, Eric D.
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Date of Issue
2011-01-01
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Title
Review of Creaturely Theology -- Edited by Celia Deane-Drummond and David Clough
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bookreview
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Publisher Statement: This is the accepted version of the following article: Meyer, Eric Daryl. "Review of Creaturely Theology -- Edited by Celia Deane-Drummond and David Clough." Reviews in Religion and Theology 18, no. 3 (2011): 437-440, which has been published in final form at [<a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9418.2011.00858.x">https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9418.2011.00858.x</a>]. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with the Wiley Self-Archiving Policy [<a href="http://olabout.wiley.com/WileyCDA/Section/id-828039.html">http://olabout.wiley.com/WileyCDA/Section/id-828039.html</a>].
Abstract
The collected essays comprising Creaturely Theology are announced as a bold entry of properly theological voices into a new ‘wave’ of conversation about animals—one concerned with how (as opposed to whether) animals matter and how they are presented, absented, and represented in language. While expressing gratitude to earlier scholars like Andrew Linzey, editors Celia Deane Drummond and David Clough lament that theologians have been comparatively slow (relative to colleagues in other disciplines) to take up ‘the question of the animal,’ even though articulations of the relationships between humans other animals—or, more abstractly, humanity and animality— frequently use the divine as a point of triangulation. Given that philosophers, feminists, and political theorists (Midgley, Adams, Derrida, and Agamben, for examples) have been attending to ‘God, humans, and other animals’ for some time, they argue that the analyses of theologians are an overdue addition to the conversation. Insofar as before God the category ‘creature’ functions as a larger frame containing any difference between humans and animals, the ‘question of the animal,’ they suggest, must be addressed by a ‘creaturely theology’ which calls into question the human production of ‘animal’ alterity.