Religion, Narrative, and the Environmental Humanities
Religion, Narrative, and the Environmental Humanities

Author: Matthew Newcomb

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-12-02

Total Pages: 219

ISBN-13: 1000800954

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Religion, Narrative, and the Environmental Humanities provides a fresh look at rhetoric, religion, and environmental humanities through narratives of evangelical culture, analyses of evangelical writing, and their connection to environmental topics. This volume aims to present a cultural understanding between evangelical and non-evangelical communities, exploring how environmental priorities and differences fit within the thinking and felt experiences of American evangelicalism. Offering a variety of theological topics, chapters include discussion of key themes such as eschatology, scriptural authority, or stewardship, and their relationship to evangelical thinking and conceptualization within climate change rhetoric. To help readers better access evangelicalism and translate these ideas, each chapter utilizes individual narratives located within evangelicalism to set an affective or experiential base for readers. In addition, this volume includes textual analysis of key documents within each section to further explore the environmental issues, values, and elements within the subculture of American evangelicalism. This volume will be essential for all scholars interested in bridging the gap of cultural translation and exploring the deep rhetorical roots of evangelical attitudes toward environmental issues.

Avatar and Nature Spirituality
Avatar and Nature Spirituality

Author: Bron Taylor

Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press

Published: 2013-09-30

Total Pages: 379

ISBN-13: 1554588804

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Avatar and Nature Spirituality explores the cultural and religious significance of James Cameron’s film Avatar (2010), one of the most commercially successful motion pictures of all time. Its success was due in no small measure to the beauty of the Pandora landscape and the dramatic, heart-wrenching plight of its nature-venerating inhabitants. To some audience members, the film was inspirational, leading them to express affinity with the film’s message of ecological interdependence and animistic spirituality. Some were moved to support the efforts of indigenous peoples, who were metaphorically and sympathetically depicted in the film, to protect their cultures and environments. To others, the film was politically, ethically, or spiritually dangerous. Indeed, the global reception to the film was intense, contested, and often confusing. To illuminate the film and its reception, this book draws on an interdisciplinary team of scholars, experts in indigenous traditions, religious studies, anthropology, literature and film, and post-colonial studies. Readers will learn about the cultural and religious trends that gave rise to the film and the reasons these trends are feared, resisted, and criticized, enabling them to wrestle with their own views, not only about the film but about the controversy surrounding it. Like the film itself, Avatar and Nature Spirituality provides an opportunity for considering afresh the ongoing struggle to determine how we should live on our home planet, and what sorts of political, economic, and spiritual values and practices would best guide us.

Inherit the Holy Mountain
Inherit the Holy Mountain

Author: Mark Stoll

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 441

ISBN-13: 019023086X

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Inherit the Holy Mountain puts religion at the center of the history of American environmentalism rather than at its margins, demonstrating how religion provided environmentalists with content, direction, and tone for the environmental causes they espoused.

Weather, Religion and Climate Change
Weather, Religion and Climate Change

Author: Sigurd Bergmann

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2023-01-09

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780367655198

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Weather, Religion and Climate Change is the first in-depth exploration of the fascinating way in which the weather impacts on the fields of religion, art, culture, history, science, and architecture. In critical dialogue with meteorology and climate science, this book takes the reader beyond the limits of contemporary thinking about the Anthropocene and explores whether a deeper awareness of weather might impact on the relationship between nature and self. Drawing on a wide range of examples, including paintings by J.M.W. Turner, medieval sacred architecture, and Aristotle's classical Meteorologica, Bergmann examines a geographically and historically wide range of cultural practices, religious practices, and worldviews in which weather appears as a central, sacred force of life. He also examines the history of scientific meteorology and its ambivalent commodification today, as well as medieval "weather witchery" and biblical perceptions of weather as a kind of "barometer" of God's love. Overall, this volume explores the notion that a new awareness of weather and its atmospheres can serve as a deep cultural and spiritual driving force that can overcome the limits of the Anthropocene and open a new path to the "Ecocene", the age of nature. Drawing on methodologies from religious studies, cultural studies, art history and architecture, philosophy, environmental ethics and aesthetics, history, and theology, this book will be of great interest to all those concerned with studying the environment from a transdisciplinary perspective on weather and wisdom.

Animals as Religious Subjects
Animals as Religious Subjects

Author: Celia Deane-Drummond

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2013-08-15

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 0567015645

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This book examines one of the most pressing cultural concerns that surfaced in the last decade - the question of the place and significance of the animal. This collection of essays represents the outcome of various conversations regarding the animal studies and shows multidisciplinarity at its very best, namely, a rigorous approach within one discipline in conversation with others around a common theme. The contributors discuss the most relevant disciplines regarding this conversation, namely: philosophy, anthropology, religious studies, theology, history of religions, archaeology and cultural studies. The first section, Thinking about Animals, explores philosophical, anthropological and religious perspectives, raising general questions about the human perception of animals and its crucial cultural significance. The second section explores the intriguing topic of the way animals have been used historically as religious symbols and in religious rituals. The third section re-examines some Christian theological and biblical approaches to animals in the light of current concerns. The final section extends the implications of traditional views about other animals to more specific ethical theories and practices.

In Search of a Course
In Search of a Course

Author: Mark Cladis

Publisher: Regal House Publishing

Published: 2021-01-08

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781646030132

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When Mark Cladis embarks, he is spiritually lost, shaken by a failed marriage, and disillusioned by the academic life he has chosen. This is how Paul Kane and Mark Cladis, two Vassar professors, find themselves on a road trip through the Southwest desert. During the trip, Cladis encounters several teachers--Native American educators, local artists, Paul, and the desert itself--who inspire revelations about the land, education, friendship, and the ways of love. Cladis returns considerably healed, spiritually revived, and possessed of a new hope for his life and vocation. On this journey, equally thrilling and healing, he encounters dangers and seeming miracles. From these experiences he receives a distinct feeling of belonging--to the earth, to a spiritual and intellectual ancestry, to a friendship. In Search of a Course is a memoir about those days in the desert that saved his life. It discusses the emotional and embodied strategies he learned in the desert to mitigate suffering, find peace, and repair his life.

The Environmental Humanities
The Environmental Humanities

Author: Robert S. Emmett

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2017-10-13

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 0262342308

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A concise overview of this multidisciplinary field, presenting key concepts, central issues, and current research, along with concrete examples and case studies. The emergence of the environmental humanities as an academic discipline early in the twenty-first century reflects the growing conviction that environmental problems cannot be solved by science and technology alone. This book offers a concise overview of this new multidisciplinary field, presenting concepts, issues, current research, concrete examples, and case studies. Robert Emmett and David Nye show how humanists, by offering constructive knowledge as well as negative critique, can improve our understanding of such environmental problems as global warming, species extinction, and over-consumption of the earth's resources. They trace the genealogy of environmental humanities from European, Australian, and American initiatives, also showing its cross-pollination by postcolonial and feminist theories. Emmett and Nye consider a concept of place not synonymous with localism, the risks of ecotourism, and the cultivation of wild areas. They discuss the decoupling of energy use and progress, and point to OECD countries for examples of sustainable development. They explain the potential for science to do both good and harm, examine dark visions of planetary collapse, and describe more positive possibilities—alternative practices, including localization and degrowth. Finally, they examine the theoretical impact of new materialism, feminism, postcolonial criticism, animal studies, and queer ecology on the environmental humanities.

Religion, Materialism and Ecology
Religion, Materialism and Ecology

Author: Sigurd Bergmann

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-05-31

Total Pages: 186

ISBN-13: 1000879208

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This timely collection of essays by leading international scholars across religious studies and the environmental humanities advances a lively discussion on materialism in its many forms. While there is little agreement on what ‘materialism’ means, it is evident that there is a resurgence in thinking about matter in more animated and active ways. The volume explores how debates concerning the new materialisms impinge on religious traditions and the extent to which religions, with their material culture and beliefs in the Divine within the material, can make a creative contribution to debates about ecological materialisms. Spanning a broad range of themes, including politics, architecture, hermeneutics, literature and religion, the book brings together a series of discussions on materialism in the context of diverse methodologies and approaches. The volume investigates a range of issues including space and place, hierarchy and relationality, the relationship between nature and society, human and other agencies, and worldviews and cultural values. Drawing on literary and critical theory, and queer, philosophical, theological and social theoretical approaches, this ground-breaking book will make an important contribution to the environmental humanities. It will be a key read for postgraduate students, researchers and scholars in religious studies, cultural anthropology, literary studies, philosophy and environmental studies.

Grounding Religion
Grounding Religion

Author: Whitney A. Bauman

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-09-13

Total Pages: 331

ISBN-13: 1000953173

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Now in its third edition, Grounding Religion explores relationships between the environment and religious beliefs and practices. Established scholars introduce students to the ways religion shapes and is shaped by human–earth relations, surveying a series of key issues and questions, with particular attention to issues of environmental degradation, social justice, ritual practices, and religious worldviews. Case studies, discussion questions, and further readings enrich students’ experience. This third edition features updated content, including revisions of every chapter and new material on religion and the environmental humanities, sexuality and queer studies, class, ability, privilege and power, environmental justice, extinction, biodiversity, and politics. An excellent text for undergraduates and graduates alike, it offers an expansive overview of the academic field of religion and ecology as it has emerged in the past fifty years and continues to develop today.

Routledge Handbook of Religion and Ecology
Routledge Handbook of Religion and Ecology

Author: Willis J. Jenkins

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-07-22

Total Pages: 693

ISBN-13: 131765532X

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The moral values and interpretive systems of religions are crucially involved in how people imagine the challenges of sustainability and how societies mobilize to enhance ecosystem resilience and human well-being. The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Ecology provides the most comprehensive and authoritative overview of the field. It encourages both appreciative and critical angles regarding religious traditions, communities, attitude, and practices. It presents contrasting ways of thinking about "religion" and about "ecology" and about ways of connecting the two terms. Written by a team of leading international experts, the Handbook discusses dynamics of change within religious traditions as well as their roles in responding to global challenges such as climate change, water, conservation, food and population. It explores the interpretations of indigenous traditions regarding modern environmental problems drawing on such concepts as lifeway and indigenous knowledge. This volume uniquely intersects the field of religion and ecology with new directions within the humanities and the sciences. This interdisciplinary volume is an essential reference for scholars and students across the social sciences and humanities and for all those looking to understand the significance of religion in environmental studies and policy.