My philosophical interests are extremely varied and are unified by method as much as topic. If one thinks labels are useful, it makes sense to call me a hermeneutic philosopher. This means that I am interested in the “surplus of meaning” evident in all human experience and understanding, as well as the role played by interpretation, perspective, finitude, fallibility, and similar constraints in that experience and understanding.

It would also be accurate to say that my research and teaching tends to engage environmental philosophy, broadly construed. I say “broadly construed” because my interests include topics and themes that fall under what non-specialists often think of as environmental philosophy—the ethics of climate change, the ethical status of non-human animals, environmental justice and racism, the value of wilderness, and similar topics—but also include other topics that are “environmental” in a somewhat looser sense, including embodiment, implacement, and the meaningfulness of our shared world.

From this hermeneutic perspective, my approach is consciously interdisciplinary. My work is broadly informed by what is described as the “continental” tradition of philosophy; however, I have also engaged thinkers trained in the analytic tradition, pragmatists, non-Western philosophies, and scholars from other disciplines a variety of other disciplines: ecology, psychology, theology, literature, and poetry, among others.

I am the author or editor of eight books, and the author of over forty articles and book chapters in addition to various and sundry non-academic essays and op-ed pieces. That work touches on diverse issues including identity, otherness, nature, wilderness, toleration, forgiveness, hope, virtue, flourishing, God, prayer, place, narrative, embodiment, politics, hospitality, faith, love, and simplicity.

Projects currently underway (2020) include a monograph exploring the experience of particular wild places, an edited volume on narrative imagination and applied hermeneutics, and a number of shorter pieces exploring issues including climate ethics, mysticism, wildness, and risk.