coming soon
Forthcoming Books
Melancholy for the World & The Unmaking of My Mother
Michael is currently working on two books. His current academic book, Melancholy for the World, develops the theory of structural grief for a time of systemic loss. His first book for a general trade audience, The Unmaking of My Mother, is about Alzheimer's as a spiritual teacher, an illness of forgetting that reminds us how to be more fully human. Both works invite readers to reflect on grief as a way of knowing ourselves and the world more fully.
browse my latest books.
Awarded the John Templeton Prize for Theological Promise, a prestigious international prize for a first book, The Tangled Bank regrounds theological ethics in an ecological account of human moral and religious experience. In response to the fundamental moral challenge of our time, the expansion of human power beyond the scope of existing moral theories, the book argues for a return to the basic questions of moral anthropology: What does it mean to be a moral creature in a more-than-human world? Hogue develops an innovative response to that question by fusing elements of Hans Jonas's post-theistic phenomenology of life with James M. Gustafson's theocentric religious naturalism.
Hailed by political theorist William E. Connolly as a "necessary read today," Hogue's American Immanence develops a political theology for the Anthropocene rooted in immanental traditions in American philosophy and theology. Fusing process, empiricist, and pragmatist thought with the "left wing of American radical theology," Hogue makes the case for an ecospirituality of resilient democracy. The constructive vision, which philosopher Nancy Frankenberry considers "one of the finest integrations of complex streams of American thought she has read in a long time," offers a spiritually vital, ecologically attuned, emancipatory democratic politics for an age of uncertainty.
In this book, Michael S. Hogue and Dean Phillip Bell develop interreligious resilience as a new model of interreligious engagement. The book explains why interreligious engagement is so important now and yet also so difficult, offers a brief historical map of models of interreligious thought and leadership, develops the VITA method for building interreligious resilience, and presents case studies for readers to practice interreligious learning.
The Promise of Religious Naturalism shows how religious naturalism's distinctive response to religion's contemporary transformations and the world's ecological peril offers a promising contemporary option for religious ethical life. Hogue defines religious naturalism as a unique blend of naturalistic theories of religion with religious interpretations of nature. The book undertakes the first extended study of the works of religious naturalist thinkers Loyal Rue, Donald Crosby, Jerome Stone, and Ursula Goodenough.
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What the readers are saying
American Immanence: How at this moment of American precarity can one book combine such precise prophetic timelinesswith so vast a conceptual apparatus? How can it remain at once lucidly engaging in its activating rhetoric and philosophically nuanced in its theopolitics? How can it bring home to us the planetary force of Anthropocene uncertainty without one bout of apocalyptic hysteria? Read Hogue and learn how! Catherine Keller, author of Cloud of the Impossible
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What the readers are saying
American Immanence: “This is one of the finest integrations of complex streams of American thought that I have read in along time. Hogue has given us a theopolitical vision of nature that is at once philosophically stirring and religiously relevant to the perplexities of our Anthropocene paradox. American Immanence
draws upon James, Dewey, Whitehead, and their lineage to make a sophisticated case for pragmatic
naturalism. It is elegant, erudite, and morally urgent. Nancy Frankenberry, Dartmouth College
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What the readers are saying
American Immanence,’ ‘the fourth trial of democracy,’ ‘ a bifocal political theology,’ ‘the Anthropocene paradox ’with these explosive concepts, Hogue provides us with activist, democratic ways to think and respond to the contemporary tradition. Both drawing and working upon James, Dewey, and Whitehead to come to terms with the contemporary condition, this book inspires and illuminates the democratic Left at the same time. A necessary read today. William E. Connolly, author of Facing the Planetary
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What the readers are saying
Interreligious Resilience: Enacting Civic Engagement and Social Transformation : “ Grounded in the practice of interreligious resilience, this is a clarion call to collaborative action for a more socially just and environmentally regenerative world. It is an essential resource for interreligious leaders seeking catalytic ways to respond to social and economic inequality, ecological crises, religious supremacy, and ethnonationalism. We can undo patterns of religious supremacy and create resilient communities and forms of belonging sustained by creative vulnerability and interreligious engagement!” Sharon D. Welch, Author of After the Protests are Heard
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What the readers are saying
The Promise of Religious Naturalism; “Michael Hogue promises and delivers an appreciative yet critical reading of this movement....It is extraordinary to behold this combination of academic rigor and existential vibrancy. In the end, this may be the lasting contribution of this book: it consistently unites measured passion with scholarly expertise and refuses to subordi- nate one to the other―and that is truly rare.” ―The Journal Of Religion
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What the readers are saying
The Promise of Religious Naturalism; 'Michael Hogue has given us a philosophically sophisticated, historically insightful, and rhetorically lucid appraisal of the emergent phenomenon of religious naturalism. An indispensable guide, The Promise of Religious Naturalism represents constructive intellectual criticism at its very best.” ― Loyal Rue, Luther College
