Embodying the World: The Spiritual Significance of the Earth

When working at the intersection between two disciplines, it is important to be precise about the meaning of key terms.After all, it can be easy for the same word to have slightly different meanings in different disciplines.To say something is "essentially true" means something quite different in philosophy than it does in business writing, for example: in the former case, it means "necessarily true," while in the latter case it means something like "more or less accurate."When this disciplinary difference is not recognized, insights from the use of a term in one discipline may be applied directly to uses of the term in the other discipline, without accounting for the fact that the terms might mean something different.When that happens, a genuinely interdisciplinary insight is missed, precisely because the differences between the different disciplines were not adequately accounted for, examined, and learned from.For this reason, it is important to be clear and precise about the meaning of key terms before one attempts inter-disciplinary work.This is worth mentioning in the context of the current journal issue, which is seeking to examine the intersection of three distinct disciplines: philosophical phenomenology, theology, and environmental studies.In light of that concern, the goal of this paper is quite modest: to clarify the different meanings of 'world' and 'earth' in phenomenology, so that we can begin to set those concepts more properly in conversation with the notion of 'creation care' in Christian environmental circles.[1]My hope is that this clarification may also prove helpful for conversation in environmental theology proper, but that is not my primary goal here.Rather, my interest in this topic is motivated by my experiences in several Christian contexts where concern for the