Mary-Jane Rubenstein,

Wesleyan University

Mary-Jane Rubenstein is Dean of the Social Sciences, and Professor of Religion, Science in Society, Philosophy, and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Wesleyan University.

She is the author of numerous books on the intersections of science and religion, including Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race (Chicago, 2022) and Pantheologies: Gods, Worlds, Monsters (Columbia, 2019).

“The Monstrous Mixture of Things: Pantheist Entanglements”

Perhaps the most despised of all theological positions, pantheism affirms the identity of God with the universe. This lecture offers an account of pantheism’s nearly unanimous dismissal within the western canon as the product of interrelated fears around sexed, gendered, racial, and ontological entanglements. It also identifies conscious and unconscious resurrections of this position within modernist and contemporary literatures, theologies, and the natural and social sciences.