The main title of Simone Horstmann's book poses a profound and fundamental question. In its English translation, it is What Do We Lack When We Lack Animals? or, to offer a different translation, What Do We Miss When Animals Are Absent? The subtitle reads: A Theological Search for Traces. To find the traces, Horstmann, a Catholic theologian teaching at the Technical University of Dortmund, who also studied philosophy and German literature, offers us a varied, exacting, and truly eye-opening study filled with narratives of human and nonhuman animals, saints and theologians, and scientists and philosophers. One encounters elaborate reflections on linguistics and literary criticism alongside poems and stories, quite a few of an autobiographical nature. The book, as Horstmann accurately explains, “constantly oscillates between a situatedness of its question within various academic discourses on the one hand, and an experience-based, occasionally narrative and essayistic style of writing on the...

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