“return of a pagan religious conception, which was half-buried (though never fully so) by the rise of Christianity. What is that conception? Simply this: that divinity is fundamentally inside the world rather than outside it; that God or the gods or Being are ultimately part of nature rather than an external creator, and that meaning and morality and metaphysical experience are to be sought in a fuller communion with the immanent world rather than a leap toward the transcendent.”

Ahhhh…..here Douthat falls into that “gnostic blindness”, trying ever so hard to posit God’s transcendence as superseding immanence. PanENtheism is confused with pantheism, and so we have this anti-ecology that sees ecotheology as idolatry of the earth, and therefore “a new religion”, since it seems to depart so radically from the “Biblical” that they know, where God lives “up and above”, somewhere “up there” in a “higher” place than this “base flesh and earth” that is “temporary” until we are “perfected” into some other state. Not at all the Hebrew , Old Testament sense, and not really Jesus (who was in that line), until Paul began his appropriation of Greek notions that he meant to “help” explain, but not to supplant the notion of salvation as restoration and redemption.