Browsing by Author "Thoemmes Continuum Publishers, publisher"

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Open Access
Aesthetics of nature and the sacred
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2005) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-2025, author; Thoemmes Continuum Publishers, publisher
Confronting nature one experiences the archetypes of the world. A living landscape couples dynamism with antiquity and demands an order of aesthetic interpretation that one is unlikely to find in art and its artifacts. A visit to wildlands contributes to the human sense of place in space and time, of duration, antiquity, continuity, to the human mystery of being the sole aesthetician in a kaleidoscopic universe. One encounters "the types and symbols of Eternity" (Wordsworth). We reach the sense of the sublime. When beauty transforms into the sublime, the aesthetic is elevated into the numinous. Perhaps the supernatural is gone, but the natural can be supercharged with mystery. If anything at all on Earth is sacred, it must be this enthralling creativity that characterizes our home planet. Here an appropriate aesthetics becomes spiritually demanding.
Open Access
Rolston III, Holmes (1932-) (Posas)
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2005) Posas, Paula J., author; Thoemmes Continuum Publishers, publisher
Rolston is widely recognized as the "father of environmental ethics," his writings making clear an ethics of nature, with intrinsic, instrumental, and systemic value. Ethics are for people but not only about people. Humans ought not always to put themselves first, but to put themselves in place in the biospheric community in which they reside. Only then will they become Homo sapiens, the "wise species."
Open Access
Science
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2005) Rolston, Holmes, 1932-2025, author; Thoemmes Continuum Publishers, publisher
Nature is both a scientific and a religious challenge. Nature must be evaluated within cultures, classically by their religions, currently also by the sciences so eminent in Western culture. Religious persons often find something "beyond," discovering that neither nature nor culture are self-explanatory as phenomena; both point to deeper forces, such as divine presence, or Brahman or Emptiness (sunyata) or Tao underlying. Religions often detect supernature immanent in or transcendent to nature, perhaps even more so in human culture, though some religions prefer to think of a deeper account of Nature, perhaps enchanted, perhaps sacred.