That’s the name of the author of a book I’m reading — Ursula Goodenough.
I usually don’t read non-fiction, but this book was recommended in an article by one of my favorite atheists, Natalie Angiers.
In the Introduction to The Sacred Depths of Nature, Goodenough writes:
My agenda for this book is to outline the foundations for…a plantetary…ethic that would make no claim to supplant existing traditions but would seek to coexist with them, informing our global concerns while we continue to orient our daily lives in our cultural and religious contexts….
…..It is therefore the goal of this book to present an accessible account of our scientific understanding of Nature and then suggest ways that this account can call forth appealing and abiding religious responses — an approach that can be called religious naturalism. If religious emotions can be elicited by natural reaity — and I believe that they can — then the story of Nature has the potential to serve as the cosmos for the global ethos that we need to articulate.
Religious Naturalism. I like the sound of that because Nature does inspire me in ways that others are inspired by the notion of “god.”
The drawings of nature in Goodenough’s book, done by Ippy Patterson of North Carolina, are inspiring in themselves. This is my favorite:
punica granatum.

Every religious fundamentalist should read this book — as well as evey atheist who yearns for a sense of the sacred.