Jea Sophia Oh (West Chester University of Pennsylvania)

October 22, 2026 | 17.45 – 19.15 | MESH, EAI Library, Wienand Haus, Weyertal 59, 3rd floor

This lecture reinterprets Donghak 東學 (Eastern Learning), a nineteenth-century Korean religious-philosophical movement, through salim—the Korean concept of enlivening—as ecopoiesis: the continual bringing-forth, sustaining, and regeneration of a shared world of life. Rather than approaching Donghak primarily as a historical synthesis of religious traditions, it retrieves its life-centered cosmology to reimagine ecological existence beyond the divisions of human and nature, sacred and material, subject and world. Donghak’s sicheonju 侍天主, the embodied “bearing of Heaven,” and samgyeong 三敬, reverence for Heaven, humans, and all beings, disclose a theo-anthropo-cosmic spirituality in which sacredness permeates the relational fabric of existence. This vision moves beyond critiques of empire and epistemic domination by decolonizing the deeper ontological hierarchies that determine what counts as sacred, agentive, and fully alive. Donghak thus emerges not simply as an object of historical recovery but as a generative spiritual ecology—a mode of world-making in which humans, more-than-human beings, and the earth participate in one another’s becoming. Such respiritualisation opens toward a sympoietic vision of planetary flourishing: not an “environment” external to human life and awaiting management, but a living world continually composed, sustained, and enlivened through relations of reverence, reciprocity, and shared becoming.

Bio
Dr. Jea Sophia Oh is Professor of Philosophy at West Chester University of Pennsylvania, specializing in Asian and comparative philosophy and theology, religion and ecology, and decolonial and feminist thought. Her monograph, A Postcolonial Theology of Life: Planetarity East and West (2011), develops a Korean ecofeminist theology through a comparative engagement with A. N. Whitehead’s process thought and Donghak (Eastern Learning). Her edited and co-authored works include Nature’s Transcendence and Immanence (2017), Suffering and Evil in Nature (2021), Emotions in Korean Philosophy and Religion (2022), and Greening Philosophy of Religion (2024). Her forthcoming book, Korean Goddesses and Cultural Narratives: Salim Thealogical Hermeneutics for Planetary Care, further develops her work in ecofeminist hermeneutics and planetary ecology through a comparative engagement with Korean goddess traditions. She currently serves as Vice President of the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy and holds leadership roles in several international philosophical societies.