What exactly is the difference?

A temporal chain of causality would be akin to saying 'x happened, and because of that, y happened after it, which eventually led to z'. It's the sort of causal chain we're quite familiar with.

A chain of contingency is more like 'x exists, which allows y to exist, hence z exists.' It's not necessarily a chronological chain. In this case, it's saying that God exists, hence the universe exists- but because time is part of the Universe, God did not exist before the Universe.

A similar example could be that because Euclidean geometry exists, shapes can exist. However, it wouldn't be correct to say that Euclidean geometry existed before shapes.

I've been flirting with Neo-Animism, which is the belief in other-than-human persons.

For what it's worth, from a purely secular lens, I'm quite fond of the Actor Network Theory of Bruno Latour or the 'Hybrid Geographies' of Sarah Whatmore. Both posit that there is no fundamentally human personhood- we can only be understood in relation to other actors. As such, it grants pseduo-personhood to quite literally everything on a sliding scale (a horse has more personhood than a rock, but that doesn't preclude the rock having some element of 'personhood')

I don't know how keen I am on the idea- I can't quite shake the old idea that there is something distinct about humans, particularly symbolic language, - but I accept that's probably more personal preference than a reasoned argument.

I've also wondered if it's accepted that God is male?

The language used is male, but very few Christians would argue God actually is male. He very much transcends the male-female distinction- it's just that the Bible was written in a highly patriarchal society where it would have been hard to conceive of God as anything other than male.