Ecologies of Ecstasy

Up from the earthy ground of Simone Kotva’s contemplative ecology grows an enlivening entanglement of plant theory and mystical practice. Tapping such unlikely roots as Plotinus, Kotva does not just trace a deep, startlingly earthy theological history of vegetal contemplation but also grows a vibrant green hybrid of Christian mysticism and the plant life of our planet. May this via vegativa open fresh vistas of ecological healing. – Catherine Keller, author of No Matter What: Crisis and the Spirit of Planetary PossibilityThis is a brave and wonderful book, a return to the ancient understanding of philosophy as spiritual exercises that blossoms, almost literally, into an understanding of our spiritual unity with all creaturely life. Richly resourced and imaginatively conceived, this book shows us how much we can learn, as did our predecessors in spiritual direction, by attending to all living and growing things—and especially to plants. – Janet Soskice, William K. Warren Distinguished Research Professor of Catholic Theology, Duke Divinity SchoolMore and more thinkers are coming to the conclusion that our whole approach to thinking itself needs a radical reconstruction—one that foregrounds our connection with the rest of the material world and recovers the centrality of contemplative rather than instrumentalizing habits of seeing. Simone Kotva’s beautiful and ambitious book offers a luminous vision of how we might address this. – Rowan Williams, University of CambridgeIn Ecologies of Ecstasy, Simone Kotva opens a space where mysticism and vegetal being converge. This is a work of rare sensitivity and philosophical courage, one that lets contemplation take root in the soil of shared plant life through thinking that breathes, grows, and blossoms beyond the limits of the self. A book to dwell with and to let germinate in one’s own practice of attention. – Michael Marder, author of Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life

Simone Kotva is senior lecturer in the Department of Literature, History of Ideas, and Religion at the University of Gothenburg. She is the author of Effort and Grace: On the Spiritual Exercise of Philosophy (2020).