Reading Michael Raposa's Theosemiotic: Religion, Reading, and the Gift of Meaning (2020) was certainly an eye-opening experience for this author who approaches theosemiotic questions from the perspective of a speculative naturalism.1 “Speculative Naturalism” is an offshoot of “ecstatic naturalism”—a religious naturalism created by the American theologian Robert S. Corrington, whose theology I have developed and extended in religious terms in what I have chosen to refer to as “bleak theology,” outlined in writings such as Charles Sanders Peirce and a Religious Metaphysics of Nature (2011), “Speculative Naturalism: A Bleak Theology in Light of the Tragic” (2014), and the forthcoming Speculative Naturalism: Philosophy After Nature (2021).2
Speculative naturalism (and subsequently bleak theology) seeks to extend the basic principles of ecstatic naturalism by first, honoring the most capacious sense of nature's breadth, depth, and scope that determines what is and what can be (ontological parity) and second, acknowledging the limits...
