Gaia and Religious Pluralism in Bruno Latour′s ′New-Materialism′

In his works on ecological philosophy, Bruno Latour develops an interesting perspective on religion and pluralism. He proposes a new worldview, in which religion is reinterpreted in view of a Gaian philosophy. He extends ' pluralism ' beyond the anthropocentrism that dominates modern humanism. In his book Facing Gaia Latour includes nonhuman beings in a larger community and works towards a larger concept of eco-humanism. In this paper, I try to reconstruct his position by showing that the philosophical foundation for his interpretation of religion could be called ' terrarism ' and is to be classified as a form of new materialism. This new interpretation of materialism has postmodernist origins (inspired by Gilles Deleuze), but it is not identical to it, because Latour distances himself from ' postmodernism '. He wants to positively contribute to a new ontology. My point is that Latour ' s ' terrarist ' grounding of religious pluralism obstructs any foundation of transcendence and, finally, congests a really pluralistic ecumene because he still adheres to the postmodernist idea that we should renounce to a unitary principle of being. His ideas on eco-humanism and pluralistic ecumene could gain momentum if we opened ourselves to a more holistic and spiritual way of thinking, retaking Lovelock ' s conception of Gaia. However, Latour ' s new-materialistic interpretation of ' animism ' can be seen as a positive contribution to a new perspective of the world that definitively sets ' materialism ' aside.