Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture

Sarah D. Wald, David J. Vazquez, Priscilla Solis Ybarra, Sarah Jaquette Ray, Eds., Latinx Environmentalisms: Place, Justice, and the Decolonial

2022-11-09T17:28:43+00:00

Sarah D. Wald, David J. Vazquez, Priscilla Solis Ybarra, Sarah Jaquette Ray, Eds., Latinx Environmentalisms: Place, Justice, and the Decolonial (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2019), 366 pp., $115.50 (hbk), ISBN: 9781439916674.

Michael D. McNally, Defend the Sacred: Native American Religious Freedom Beyond the First Amendment

2021-07-26T18:55:37+00:00

Michael D. McNally, Defend the Sacred: Native American Religious Freedom Beyond the First Amendment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), 400 pp., $99.95 (hbk), ISBN: 9780691190891.

Heuser, Andreas & Jens Koehrsen (eds). Does Religion Make a Difference? Religious NGOs in International Development Collaboration

2022-11-09T17:28:38+00:00

Heuser, Andreas & Jens Koehrsen (eds). Does Religion Make a Difference? Religious NGOs in International Development Collaboration (Baden-Baden, Germany: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 2020), 364pp., $89 (pbk), ISBN: 9783848767069.

The Redemption of Matter

2022-05-05T00:15:44+00:00

Despite her biographical proximity to figures such as Emerson and Thoreau, the nineteenth-century writer and editor Margaret Fuller is not often considered an environmentalist. Indeed, she is more often remembered for her contributions to political feminism than to environmentalism. I argue that in Fuller’s writing, however, an environmental ethics emerges in conjunction with her questioning of the binary between ‘matter’ and ‘spirit’. In place of this binary, Fuller proposed fluidity. This is evidenced in her first book, Summer on the Lakes, a literary travelogue chronicling Fuller’s journey through the West. With recourse to theoretical concerns in feminist new materialisms, I first demonstrate how her understanding of fluidity was influenced by the nineteenth-century vitalist theory of animal
magnetism. I then turn to the ways that Fuller takes her encounters with the West’s watery sites—its waterfalls, rivers, and lakes—as occasions to articulate an anticolonial environmental ethics.

‘Dash me with Amorous Wet, I can Repay You’

2022-11-09T17:28:33+00:00

Walt Whitman’s poetry is famously full of ‘self’ and self-contradicting: ‘Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)’ The scholarly attention to paradox and contradiction often takes the form of an attention to various ‘binaries’ in Whitman’s prose and poetry; well-trod binaries include body-soul, sacred-profane, nature-culture, and woman-man. However, a queer attention to the poetic construction of such binaries reveals them to be fluid and ultimately non-binary. Whitman and his speakers construct binaries that relate to religion, gender, and nature, but in poeticizing the construction of binary logic (e.g., man-woman), Whitman and his speakers reveal such purportedly self-contained and discrete domains to be open, fluid, and co-constituting. Recognizing the poetic performance of ‘binary’ logic will reshape reader’s understanding of ethical and political implications of Whitman’s queerly relational nature ethics.

The Watery Depths of American Environmentalism

2022-11-09T17:28:49+00:00

Legacies of American environmentalism are grounded in androcentric and heteronormative narratives that have downplayed significant contributions by women. A re-narration of American Environmentalism detailed through the lives and work of three pioneering women, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, Rachel Carson, and Sylvia Earle, provides a new focal perspective on environmental ethics via a deeper, aqua-centric lens, or what we call a ‘water ethic’. For all three women, their work was informed by deep scientific knowledge of, and sense of felt connection to, their local aquatic environments. They understood humans as part of the interconnected biological ecosystem and drew early connections between local environmental processes and broader planetary systems. Their individual lived experiences enabled them to see the world in a ‘queer’ way, which was markedly different than many of their contemporaries. Analyzing gender and gender nonconformity can help us to understand the importance of a water ethic for a rapidly changing planet.

Introduction to the Special Issue

2022-11-09T17:28:46+00:00

Ambiguous Legacies, Contested Futures

2022-10-04T22:14:11+00:00