The Rev. Nathaniel Warne, PhD, Bexley-Seabury 2019 and a member of our adjunct faculty, has published two books over the last year. Josef Pieper on the Spiritual Life: Creation, Contemplation, and Human Flourishing explores the connection between contemplative practices and the doctrine of creation in the thought of philosopher Pieper. Following Pieper, Warne claims that theology and spirituality cannot be bracketed from ethics and social action—indeed, our lived experience in the world blurs the lines between these practices. Contemplation and action are closer together than are typically assumed, and they have important implications for both our spiritual development and our engagement with the world around us. Ultimately, Warne’s emphasis on creation and contemplation represents an attempt to resist a view of ethics and the spiritual life that is divorced from our environment. In response to this view, Warne argues that we need a renewed sense that creation and place are important for self-understanding. Contemplation of creation is, fundamentally, a form of communion with God—we thus need a more robust sense of how ethics and politics are rooted in God’s creative action. Taking Pieper as a guide, Warne’s study helps to deepen our thinking about these connections.
Warne also recently published the third volume of Bloomsbury’s A Cultural History of Death on death in the Renaissance and the Early Modern Period With BSSF professor Tom Ferguson, he also wrote the introduction to the volume. This series explores how our understanding of death has evolved over the course of 2,500 years and asks what recorded history can tell us about how different cultures and societies have felt about, experienced, responded to and marked the occasion of death across different periods and lands.
Nathaniel A. Warne is the priest-in-charge of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Mishawaka, Indiana, and teaches at Bexley Seabury Seminary. He completed a PhD in Political Theology and Ethics at Durham in England, followed by work as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Notre Dame, where he began the process of ordination in the Diocese of Northern Indiana. He is also the author and editor of several other books, including The Call to Happiness: Eudaimonism in English Puritan Thought and Emotions and Religious Dynamics, co-edited with Douglas J. Davies.