At Home in the Universe: Mystical Naturalism or Religious Humanism?

This Editorial essay surveys twentieth- and twenty-first-century debates among liberal theologians and religious humanists over what it means to be “at home” in the universe in explicitly naturalistic terms. It traces the emergence of naturalistic theism and mystical naturalism at the University of Chicago Divinity School as mediating positions between classical supernatural theism and anti-theistic religious humanism, highlighting figures such as Gerald Birney Smith and Bernard E. Meland. The essay contrasts religious humanism’s tendency toward what Meland calls “anthro-inflation”—the exaltation of a human‑centered order—with mystical naturalism’s emphasis on human earth-rootedness, cosmic belonging, and appreciative, firsthand religious experience. It then engages later humanist voices, especially Kenneth L. Patton and David E. Bumbaugh, who develop poetic, naturalistic, and cosmological languages of reverence while rejecting supernaturalism, and at times the term “God” itself. Finally, the essay reconstructs Meland’s naturalistic theism as devotion to a “Creative Order” within nature that sustains and fulfills life, arguing for a mystical, poetic, and empirically informed religious naturalism as an alternative to both traditional theism and reductive humanism.