Local Gods - by Leah Kalmanson

About the Book

Leah Kalmanson offers a new approach to understanding the world's varied religious traditions, foregrounding the numinous, subtle, and supernormal factors that pervade many aspects of everyday life but slip through the cracks of philosophical discourse.

Book Synopsis

Indigenous activism against telescope construction on Maunakea involves the deity of volcanoes and fire. In India, a village goddess is visited at her place of residence. Across Asia, ancestors are venerated at family shrines. In many places around the world, spiritual matters and practices are local and contextual. Yet philosophy of religion often takes universalizing monotheism as the norm and overlooks other traditions, which it categorizes with oversimplified terms such as polytheism and animism.

Leah Kalmanson offers a new approach to understanding the world's varied religious traditions: a philosophy of spiritual diversity. Drawing on perspectives from Asian, Pacific, Indigenous American, and African traditions on engaging gods, ghosts, ancestors, and other types of spiritual agents and forces, Local Gods reimagines philosophy of religion from standpoints it typically neglects. A philosophy of spiritual diversity foregrounds the numinous, subtle, and supernormal factors that pervade many aspects of everyday life but slip through the cracks of discourse on religion. Instead of relying on theological frameworks, it turns to theories and methods that are internal to the traditions it considers. This radically plural philosophy highlights creativity and imagination while opening pathways for critique and political engagement. Exploring a vast range of approaches to spiritual matters, this book asks us to find ethical relations with not only the gods we might call our own but also the gods of others.

Review Quotes

A magnificent book, staggering in scope and humbling in depth. It's been a while since I've been so excited about the philosophy of religion.--Mary-Jane Rubenstein, author of Pantheologies: Gods, Worlds, Monsters

Local Gods reimagines the contours of the philosophy of religion to include an array of spiritual traditions historically discounted as primitive or pagan. Kalmanson combines memoir, philosophical analysis, and cultural critique to produce novel methodologies that avoid cultural appropriation and exoticization, while at the same time producing an eminently readable text infused with her own personal vulnerability.--Michael David Kaulana Ing, Indiana University Bloomington

Local Gods invites the reader to reimagine philosophy of religion as a philosophy of spiritual diversity. It boldly calls for an acknowledgement of the ultranatural, the most natural, to replace the blood-logic propounded by self-appointed messengers of god and the angst of diversity it triggers. An honest, self-reflexive, creative and brilliant methodological intervention.--Monika Kirloskar-Steinbach, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

About the Author

Leah Kalmanson is associate professor and Bhagwan Adinath Professor of Jain Studies in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at the University of North Texas. She is the author of Cross-Cultural Existentialism: On the Meaning of Life in Asian and Western Thought (2020) and coauthor of A Practical Guide to World Philosophies: Selves, Worlds, and Ways of Knowing (2021).