This Sacred Earth At the Nexus of Religion. Ecology and Politics (original) (raw)
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The Field of Religion and Ecology: Addressing the Environmental Crisis and Challenging Faiths
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Religion and Ecology: Towards a Communion of Creatures
Lynn White Jnr.’s much quoted and variously anthologised article “The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis, ” first published in Science in 1967, constitutes one of the earliest forays into the field that has since become known as the Environmental Humanities. White’s article effectively reframed the consideration of environmental problems, hitherto taken to be the preserve of the natural sciences, as pertaining also to the cultural realm of beliefs, values, and the narratives that bear them, by tracing the emergence within medieval Catholicism of what subsequently became the dominant ethos of human transcendence of, and mastery over, ‘nature’ within euro-western modernity. Linking a shift in the reception of a canonical text (the Bible) to the development of new relations and technologies of production (the heavy iron plow) in response to particular environmental conditions (the clay soils of Northern Europe), White’s analysis not only raised new questions about the aetiology of ecological crisis: it also modelled a new methodology that recognised non-human entities as historical agents. Importantly for the purposes of this chapter, White also argued that “since the roots of our crisis are so largely religious, the remedy must also be essentially religious, whether we call it that or not.” (1996: 14) While I consider the causality of most major environmental, or ecosocial, problems to be more multi-facetted than White’s punchy conclusion allows, I am persuaded that the study of religion and ecology, as I will outline in this chapter, has much to contribute to the work of the environmental humanities. Moreover, the growing endeavours that have since been initiated, not only by religious scholars, but also by religious leaders and communities, some in the context of inter-faith dialogue and activism, to “rethink and refeel our nature and destiny” (1996: 14) with a view to countering environmental degradation, suggests that religion has a valuable role to play in advancing sustainability and moving towards what I propose to call (with reference in particular to Christian ecotheology) the “communion of creatures”. Tragically, however, this is occurring at a time when the rise of militant religious fundamentalism is escalating inter-specific violence, reducing our capacity to work together to address the major sustainability challenges that we face globally, and helping to bring religion per se into disrepute. As I will demonstrate here, then, countering fundamentalism is a further key component in the ecological renovation of religious thought and practice.
Ecology and Contemporary Christian Theology
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This article explores contemporary shifts in eco-theological thinking as they relate to the overall field of 'religion and ecology ⁄ nature'. More specifically, this article looks not only at retrieving theological, biblical and ethical resources from Christianity to address contemporary ecological issues, but rather how meaning-making practices are changed in the contemporary context of globalization and global climate change. How does globalization challenge concepts of meaning that claim universality? How does climate change challenge a separation between moral and natural 'evil'? How do urban ecology and environmental justice challenge distinctions between humans, technology, and the rest of the natural world, and what might this mean for theological understandings of creation? In the end, these questions highlight an overall shift in theological thinking: moving from global understandings of the world toward planetary understandings.
The coalescence between the religion and ecology movements is among the most fascinating trajectories of twenty-first century environmentalism.
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‘Ecology: religious or secular?’ addresses the issue of the relation between ecology and the idea of God. ‘Social’ interpretations of ecology seem to fit with traditional Christian models, such as stewardship, for grasping the relation between humanity and nature. ‘Deep’ interpretations of ecology, in which nature is understood to encompass humanity, appear, by contrast, less amenable to assimilation by Christianity.The choice – for so it is often presented – between ‘deep’ and ‘social’ forms of ecology is thus a test case for Christianity. Does the Christian theologian opt for ‘social’ ecology because it best addresses the issue of human embeddedness in nature or because it fits better with prior metaphysical commitments?This article argues that the only way such a dilemma can be addressed theologically is by thinking through at a fundamental level the character of God’s relation to the world. An enquiry in philosophical theology, through the consideration of the concept of divine simplicity, it is argued, suggests that Christianity is not condemned to ‘religious’ readings of ecology. That is, Christianity is not obliged to select evidence based on criteria derived from prior theological commitments (e.g. to the model of stewardship).Instead, beginning in the concept of God enables a truly ‘secular’ enquiry which acknowledges a wide range of evidence of our materiality. Indeed, such a ‘secular’ enquiry can only be established by reference to the idea of God.