Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture

Shi‘ite Islamic Religious Authorities and COVID-19

Veronika Sobotková — Mon, 27 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly affected religious life and has temporarily changed some of the important religious rules of Islam. Most of the highest Shi‘ite clerics in Iran and Iraq have become active protagonists in the fight against COVID-19. The author focuses on these clerics’ support of state institutions in matters of hygiene and protection measures as well as bans on gatherings. The author then analyzes the attitudes of these clerics toward changes in religious practices during the Coronavirus epidemic: the prohibition of Friday / congregational prayers, the closing of Shi‘ite shrines (places of burial of Shi‘ite holy Imams), fasting in the holy month of Ramadan, changes in funeral customs, the issue of martyrdom due to Coronavirus infection and changes in performing the major Shi‘ite religious ceremonies of Ashura and Arba‘een.

Humans and Nature

Frans Wijsen, Zainal Abidin Bagir, Mohamad Yusuf, Samsul Ma’arif, Any Marsiyanti — Wed, 12 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The Human and Nature scale (HaN scale) was developed in the Western context to investigate the relationship between ideas about nature and landscape planning. This pilot study expands the HaN scale and includes religion as an independent variable to investigate perceptions of human-nature relations in Indonesia. It examines how religious affiliation and religious practices influence visions of human-nature relations. This study shows that religious affiliation makes no difference. Muslims, Catholics, Protestants, and Hindus share their acceptance of the stewardship, partnership, and participation models while rejecting the master model. However, religious practice does make a difference. Those who practice religion to a lesser extent tend to agree more with the mastery vision than those who practice religion to a greater extent. This study suggests that religion makes a difference, not in terms of what religion respondents affiliate with, but in how religious they are.

Building Coalitions from Shared Pieties

Samantha Senda-Cook, Emma Frances Bloomfield — Tue, 28 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The Asian Rural Institute (ARI) is a Christian organization based in Tochigi, Japan that emphasizes foodlife work (working to grow food to sustain life), servant leadership, and community development. In analyzing the experiences of ARI community members, we located three themes that encapsulate ARI’s negotiation of religious environmentalism: 1) hierarchy, 2) ritual, and 3) tensions. These themes create polyvocality, or multiple voices, which we argue builds coalitions among community members at ARI through shared values. In conversation with work on religious environmentalism, this essay positions Christianity as a coalition building resource for some environmental and social justice advocates. Furthermore, we demonstrate the capacity for coalition building among groups that share pieties rather than identity and illustrate how an organization can rhetorically mobilize and emphasize some parts of its identity to its advantage while remaining committed to all of its core values.

Activists of Faith, Betwixt and Between

Victoria Machado — Fri, 17 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Recognizing the entangled nature of religion and public activism, this article proposes a new category for individuals operating at the intersections of activism and faith communities: activists of faith, an umbrella term for activists who work in secular activist spaces while also ascribing to particular religious traditions. I propose three categories for understanding these individuals: religious outliers, organizers of faith, and evangelical activists. Drawing from eight years of ethnographic fieldwork, I offer detailed examples of each type within Florida’s environmental movement in order to provide a robust understanding of faith-based ecological resistance in a religiously conservative region of the United States. Such activists go unnoticed as they belong to secular environmental groups, often without overt connections to their religious traditions. While their personal activism may set them at odds with conservative members of their religious communities, faith is a vital part of their work and quest for justice.

Losing (and Finding) Her Religion

Luke Rodewald — Fri, 17 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Terry Tempest Williams is one of America’s preeminent environmental voices, often infusing her essays with religious rhetoric and symbolism when describing scenes of intimate encounters with nature. While scholars have previously examined the author’s disintegrating relationship with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, scant attention has been devoted to considering what Williams’s beliefs and notions of faith have, correspondingly, turned toward. By tracing Williams’s evolving attitudes toward nature, religion, and environmentalism as they emerge in several of her most recognized works, I chart how the author both lost her familial
religion and embraced an entirely new sense of spirituality—one rooted in nature and fully aligned with Bron Taylor’s theoretical conception of ‘dark green religion’. Sketching her trajectory gives further credence to Taylor’s construction, particularly its explanatory power for understanding the recurring and increasingly vocal spiritual calls issued for environmental protection by practitioners such as Williams.

Between Thankfulness and Love

Ethan Vanderleek — Tue, 28 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Philosophers in the 20th and 21st centuries have offered criticisms of the excesses of human use over the natural world and emphasized how use is increasingly controlled by technological determinism. Martin Heidegger and Michel Henry have contributed to this line of criticism, but both fall short in their critiques and recommendations because they lack a robust notion of transcendence. The philosophy of William Desmond, however, provides a historical and systematic account of human use that critiques modern culture and provides ethical and religious trajectories for addressing ecological destruction by unfettered human use. For Desmond, use must be oriented beyond itself in thankfulness for the transcendent source of what is used and in self-transcending love towards a transcendent end beyond what is used. Though humans cannot help but use the natural world, a rich account of thankfulness and love provide a ground for human use that prevents anthropocentric abuse.

Editor’s Introduction

Joseph A P Wilson — Mon, 27 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000