The Noetics of Nature: Environmental Philosophy and the Holy Beauty of the Visible

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments In a book commending the iconographic power of the visible to lead beyond discursivity, it might appear unseemly for its author to begin by working backward from the splendid cover photograph, which speaks eloquently for itself. But if images (and the sheer visibility of creation) can direct us beyond our thoughts, this same element can also bring us back enriched to thinking, and to gratitude as well— which Heidegger has insisted is, together with remembrance, closely linked to thinking. If the eikōn gathers together poetically, this is at least partly in order for reflection and recollection not to explain it, but to draw from it as from a well. To my wife, Mary, artist and professor and lover of the image, whose presence and practice have helped lure me outside the circle of my own thoughts into the open air, and who has been my faithful travel companion and indulgent accomplice across many fine and strange and wonderful lands, while enduring my sometime absence as a writer, I am lovingly indebted. To New Valamo Monastery in Finland, where she captured this photograph, looking out late from our guest-cell during one of those magical white nights of midsummer , and to those many other monasteries and monastics in Greece, Cyprus, Romania, Russia, Georgia, Palestine, Egypt, and North America (above all to Philotheou and Vatopedi monasteries on Mount Athos and to Fr. Alexios of Karakallou) who have put up with me, doubtless as a podvig or act of spiritual valor, in hopes that I might nonetheless learn a bit from them, I render my most heartfelt thanks. And of course there are those warm tones that the cover ’s designer wisely decided to reinforce, in this evocation of heaven’s golden light and the silent fertility of the earth. To my parents, then, Acknowledgments xix who raised me as a farm kid, close to a land where the gladdening gold of ripened wheat elevates the rich chocolate soil of the Kansas prairie to the heavens, in a world where cultivating the earth and being nourished by its beauty were never far apart—to them I will always be grateful, not least for mirroring these same faithful and luminous qualities of the place we inhabited. And to my own daughter , Emilie, and my students as well, for accompanying me on an intellectual and spiritual journey that sometimes seemed uncertain, I am profoundly indebted. To the many colleagues and friends (too numerous to mention, but especially those at IAEP, NPR, and SOPHIA, each an island of philosophical friendship floating intact on a sea of acronyms) who have patiently and generously listened to these ideas as they took shape and critically encouraged me along the way, I am most grateful ; traces of dialogue with them are everywhere present here. I am especially indebted to the readers of this manuscript, whose helpful comments and kind encouragement have been more important than they probably know. I want to express enduring gratitude to Helen Tartar, Editorial Director of Fordham University Press, who has warmly encouraged this project at every step, as well to Eric Newman, Managing Editor at Fordham, who has calmly, kindly kept it on schedule, and to Nancy Rapoport, my copy editor, who often saved me from my own errors and oversights. Finally, I want to thank Haden Macbeth for his diligent and intelligent work in preparing the index. Earlier versions of several chapters were published, in whole or part, in other places: Chapter 2 in Rethinking Nature: Essays in Environmental Philosophy, edited by Bruce V. Foltz and Robert Frodeman, Indiana University Press, 2004; Chapter 4 (in Greek translation ) in PEMPTOUSIA: Politismos Epistēmes Thrēskeia, Winter, 2006,andinTheNaturalCity:Re-EnvisioningtheBuiltEnvironment, ed. Stephen Scharper and Ingrid Stefanovich, University of Toronto Press, 2011; Chapter 5 in Philosophy and Theology, Vol. 18, No. 1 (2006); Chapter 6 in Research in Phenomenology, 2001; Chapter 8 in Sophia: The Journal of Traditional Studies, Vol. 13, No. 1, Spring/ Summer 2007; and Chapter 12 in Toward an Ecology of Trans- figuration: Orthodox Christian Perspectives on Environment, Nature, and Creation, ed. John Chryssavgis and Bruce V. Foltz, Fordham University Press, 2013. The Noetics of Nature ...