God and nature
The title of this book, "Teaching a Stone to Talk," is a Biblical allusion to a saying from the Old Testament prophets and in the gospels, the most famous being in Luke 19 when Jesus says that the stones cry out in worship. This book of essays is about Annie Dillard using her life stories, her experience of nature, her education about God and religion, all in harmony to try and find some sort of religious meaning in her life through nature. She treats animal life very specifically in her essays, talking about weasels, deer, farm animals, tropical jungles, island life, and the beauty of the circle of life, and she analyzes these types of transcendental order for their religious merit.
The universe as a meaningful system
Dillard begins the essays by addressing the stars first. She introduces the idea of cosmic order, and she feels throughout these essays that the order does not need any red flags to be noticed; she feels that "A Field of Silence" can be the place of a holy revelation, namely her specific revelation when she saw hosts of angels hovering over an empty, silent field. She feels that in nature, God is evident because of the systematic, orderly sense of nature. When she eats venison after hunting a deer, she admits that she enjoys eating the dead animal, and that she finds the life cycle beautiful, even for its horror.
Animals and plants
Although Dillard is undeniably Christian in her point of view, a humanist or naturalist would obviously find much to agree with her about, because many (in fact, most) of these essays are about animals, plants, the nature of life of earth, and the order of the universe. Dillard feels that these are aspects of our existence that are so unexplainable, beautiful, and relevant to the human mind, that she feels a search for meaning is a search for nature, basically. She explores the philosophical and emotional meaning of the animals and plants of the earth.
