The Cosmic Spirit

“Let yourself read a few random lines of The Cosmic Spirit—and already its flames and its flows reverberate through you. The genius of this multiversal poet opens in you an endless multiplicity of the world it wraps you back into, renewed for the earthiest of becomings now, the broadest of spaces always.”


—Catherine Keller, Professor of Constructive Theology, Drew Theological School, and author of On the Mystery: Discerning Divinity in Process





“If Reality contains multiplicity in a togetherness of difference, The Cosmic Spirit invites readers to become likewise, seeking the many-sidedness of existence in their own contexts. Relationality moves from a universal abstraction to an embodied, emplaced practice: how do I enlarge my particular multitude—of views, living beings, competing claims, and contradictions of self—in a dissonant unity with less loss? This ‘spirit’ is a verb or activity, providing an experimental model by which to expand the sense of Self, diversify modes of knowing, and enlarge the political sphere of ethical concern. This text looks through the lens of multiple religions toward transreligious practices that might co-shape planetary communities to come.”


—Brianne Donaldson, Shri Parshvanath Presidential Chair in Jain Studies, University of California, Irvine





“Imagine someone intimately conversant with classical theology and a wide range of world religions, deeply attuned to process thought, and of far greater significance critically responding to the powerful yet still inchoate tendencies and developments which define our historical moment. Roland Faber has relieved us of needing to imagine such a thinker. Nowhere is this more evident than in The Cosmic Spirit. To re-think the cosmos as chaos, when put forth as ‘a poetics of chaos,’ is not only an adventure of ideas. It is also what our moment so urgently demands. Faber has met this demand with a synoptic vision articulated in fine detail and with arresting eloquence. He shows how being a ‘poet’ faithful to the fragility of the earth and open to the irreducible heterogeneity of the ‘universe’ can provide us with a language to state more precisely than anything now available the nature of our conflicts and simply the questions resisting adequate articulation. Never has James’s ‘multiverse’ been more fully honored or the earth more persuasively centered as habitat and inheritance.”


—Vincent Colapietro, author of Peirce’s Approach to the Self: A Semiotic Perspective on Human Subjectivity