In Memoriam of Forrest Clingerman

By James Miller | Worldviews

It is with deep sadness that I mark the untimely passing on April 21, 2024 of a dear friend and colleague, Forrest Clingerman. Forrest was an outstanding scholar in the field of religion and ecology known especially for his pioneering work in environmental hermeneutics. He played an active role in the Worldviews community where he published two notable essays, served as a peer
reviewer for thirteen, and recently took over the position of associate editor.

Forrest was intrigued by the possibility of reading and interpreting nature. In his 2009 essay, “Reading the Book of Nature: A Hermeneutical Account of Nature for Philosophical Theology,” he set out a philosophical argument for reviving and reinterpreting the concept of the Book of Nature. In doing so he sought to restore an engagement between science and religion that had been broken since Galileo’s famous dictum that the language of nature was mathematics (2006: 75). For Clingerman, nature was to be understood not only through reductive mathematical abstractions but also, following Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics, as a book, a text, and a textuality. Unlike a fixed text, however, nature was to be understood as “a discourse that is not objectively fixed in nature, but rather fluidly moves in the physical presence of nature itself ” (81; original emphasis). Such a discourse, moreover, could only ever be interpreted reflexively since “[w]e find some part of ourselves when we interpret nature,” leading to the remarkable insight that we “readers are characters, reading from inside the book itself” (82). From a theological perspective, the Book of Nature, when interpreted with this reflexive hermeneutics, can possess a revelatory character.

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