Rhizomatic West: Representing the American West in a Transnational, Global Media Age (2011) that register the American West as multiple, multivalent, unstable, unfixed, and even undefinable (original) (raw)
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Enoch’s Vision and Gaia: An LDS Perspective on Environmental Stewardship
Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, 2011
Many faithful Mormons are not familiar with pronouncements concerning environmental stewardship by current and former Church leaders because such teachings typically do not receive as much emphasis from the pulpit and in Church curriculum materials as other more core teachings. Nevertheless, the LDS canon of scriptures and the teachings of Joseph Smith and subsequent LDS Church leaders reveal a rich theology pertaining to the origin and purpose of the earth and to our responsibility as stewards over nature’s bounty. This article examines several salient implications arising from the LDS teaching that the earth has a spirit and feels pain as a consequence of the spiritual defilement and literal pollution inf licted on it by human beings, as the remarkable vision of the prophet Enoch suggests. This key aspect of Mormon ecotheology may resonate more with Native American beliefs, Eastern religions, and various philosophical traditions than with traditional Protestant and Catholic concep...
Ecology and Religious Environmentalism in the United States
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion, 2018
Any discussion of ecology, environment, and religion in America rightly begins with the American landscape itself. It also properly begins with a reflection on the terms and metaphors that have been used to describe it. Although the term ecology was not coined until the mid-19th century, it is a preferred starting term in the sense that it denotes integrated natural systems within which humans are just one species among many. The word environment, however, is a particularly fitting term for any 21st-century discussion of religion and nature in America, for it frequently implies the conceptual separation of humans from the biophysical world, a separation often driven by economic interests and technological hubris whose consequences are strongly reverberating in the environmental injustices and climate change impacts we are facing today.This inquiry into the relationship between religion, nature, ecology, and environment necessarily includes the use of all three of these terms, all of...
A Comparison of Mormon and Unitarian-Universalist Attitudes Toward Environmentalism
Unitarian-Universalism and Mormonism differ in myriad ways. Mormonism obviously has much further to go toward embracing an ecological paradigm. There are some untapped resources in Mormonism which could be used to facilitate this shift, including Joseph Smith’s vitalist teachings and the Word of Wisdom advice to eat meat sparingly. However, there are major obstacles as well, some of which may be insurmountable, including Mormonism’s inherent anthropocentrism and doctrines and teachings that promote unrestricted childbirth. For their part, UUs still have work to do as well. While UUs are perhaps the most environmentally concerned of any religious group, it is also true that they are among most concerned about every other social issue of the day. The sheer number of worthy causes may contribute to diminishing the resources which are available to UUs to work against what is shaping up to be a global ecological catastrophe. References
Religions, 2022
On 6 April 1830 Joseph Smith Jr. legally established what he claimed to be the restored Church of Jesus Christ that had existed previously during the New Testament times. This bold claim was bolstered by stories of angelic visitations in the hemlock–northern hardwood forest of New York and Pennsylvania by biblical and nonbiblical figures alike. In one of Smith’s supernatural encounters he claims that immediately prior to his theophany the Devil tried to intercede and prevent his communion with God. Thus, Smith and his followers have embraced a complex worldview concerning the nineteenth-century American forest, host to both the Divine and the Devil. The nineteenth-century American forest was complicated by its dangerous elements, its economic opportunities, and the sublime quality popularized in landscape paintings. Forests existed as environments that were equal in their ability to leave one desolate, well-provisioned, or inspired. Navigating these sometimes paradoxical views, Jose...
Religious Environmentalism and Environmental Religion in America
Religion Compass, 2013
This essay aims to offer a rudimentary map of the subfield of religion and ecology by describing three distinct scholarly responses to the challenge leveled by Lynn White's influential 1967 article. It articulates an organizational view of the field by accounting for the three most prevalent perspectives on the antagonism between religion and environmentalism. The first, ecotheological apologism, looks to resuscitate "Judeo-Christian" theology from the critique that it is inherently anti-ecological. The second, sociological operationalization, forgoes normative engagement in favor of descriptive measurement, seeking to describe in empirical terms the environmental beliefs and behaviors of religious individuals in contemporary society. The third, theoretical functionalism, works to soften the very distinction between religious tradition and ecological morality. Examining the sources and outcomes of these scholarly divergences provides a reasonable account of the development of religion and ecology as an area of study and brings to the fore the challenges presently facing the subfield. In conclusion, the essay describes the exchanges among these scholarly threads and suggests how they might be woven together more closely.