Michael Hogue's The Promise of Religious Naturalism is an ambitious attempt to defend a naturalistic approach to religion. He executes this project by describing four recent writers in religious naturalism, asking of each what makes it both naturalistic and religious. Then, in his major focus, he asks how each position might engage ethical issues surrounding the planet‐wide ecological crisis. Hogue's four representative religious naturalists are: Loyal Rue, Ursula Goodenough, Jerome Stone, and Donald Crosby, each of whom has made major statements in religious naturalism. Hogue's extensive exposition and analysis of these thinkers is superb and is the best part of the book. Showing richly how each of these thinkers develops powerful, though very different, conceptions of religious naturalism, Hogue's own constructive focus emerges in pulling forth from these positions their ethical implications for addressing ecological responsibility, implications that are not themselves directly engaged in the primary focus of any of these thinkers.

Hogue is more successful in describing the content of religious naturalism in his analysis of these thinkers than he is in defending the actual promise of religious naturalism as a viable social and cultural movement. It is not clear at all how any of these positions, or all of them together, could ever mobilize the religiously social movement Hogue takes as necessary to address the threats to the ecosphere. On the other hand, each of these positions is philosophically and theologically sophisticated and deep, and Hogue is excellent in exhibiting their richness.

In some respects, however, the book is too complex, with too many threads that cannot be successfully woven together. The book is very strong in exhibiting the promise of a religiously naturalistic viewpoint, both in the depth of Hogue's exposition of the points of view of his four thinkers and in the articulation of his own naturalistic viewpoint. But this strong focus is blurred by the urgency with which Hogue wants to address the ecological crisis. Though Hogue is successful in drawing from these thinkers an ethical concern that can be shown relevant to the ecological crisis, the very lengths to which he goes to make these points detracts from the purely theological content of religious naturalism, the latter being the real strength of this book. There are really two books here that are not entirely blended into one.

The book suffers from another issue that has beset almost all attempts to articulate a religious naturalism over the last 200 years. This is connected to the fact that neither Hogue himself nor his representative thinkers develop their religious naturalisms from within the Christian and/or biblical theological traditions, as an attempt, that is, to articulate a religiously naturalistic Christian theology. Within the history of religiously naturalistic positions, this is not surprising since most thinkers in this tradition (including the ones represented here) have developed their positions in reaction against Christianity (and against the tradition of classical theism generally). But by avoiding the Christian tradition, these thinkers fail to take advantage of the deep conception of “sin” or “human fault” that otherwise would have been available to them. The result is that none of these positions has a robust conception of sin or fault, and none of them show any concern for the problem of idolatry, which can be shown to be at the root of all sin from within the biblical tradition. [That more robust conceptions of sin are available to religious naturalists can be seen in works that do develop a Christian version of naturalism. See Charley D. Hardwick, Events of Grace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966); Karl Peters, Dancing with the Sacred (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2002), and especially Karl Peters, “Confessions of a Practicing Naturalistic Theist,” Zygon: Journal of Science and Religion 40 (September 2005), esp. pp. 710–18. See also Jerome Stone, “Christian Naturalism,” The Routledge Companion to Modern Christian Theology (London: Routledge, 2012).] The result is that, despite the depth and richness of their religious naturalisms, all share a rather thin conception of human nature and particularly of human fault. Human fault here is really confined to blindness to or neglect of the environment. Prior to the twenty‐first century, most forms of religious naturalism were self‐conscious forms of humanism. Though none of Hogue's four thinkers use the term “humanism,” the same can be said of their positions. As with all humanisms, the criticism above is applicable precisely because they lack the more robust conception of human nature they might have found by a closer alignment with resources from the Christian tradition. Unfortunately, they all smack of the same kind of simple, good‐hearted, well‐intentioned innocence we see in looking back on the humanisms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

This latter criticism should not detract from Hogue's accomplishment. He skillfully shows that rich forms of religious naturalism are being developed today. His work demonstrates that there truly is a promise of religious naturalism today that goes well beyond earlier nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century versions. The reason is that these positions, including Hogue's, bring a depth of philosophical and theological sophistication to bear on religiously naturalistic viewpoints that was largely lacking in the earlier period. This is a very good book, and Michael Hogue is to be commended for it.