Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture

Introduction

2021-07-13T15:59:24+00:00

Pursuing Moral Dimensions of the Environment

2021-07-30T08:50:20+00:00

With growing economic activity and urbanization, environmental problems have become one of Iran’s most urgent challenges. Noticeably, the government has incorporated environmental measures into the country’s five-year plans for the last two decades and has since developed elaborate scientilc schemes accordingly to combat the problems. Nevertheless, serious environmental diflculties persist in every major city. Confronting these problems, the Iranian authorities began to call upon religious leaders for help and mobilized them to heighten citizens’ environmental awareness, especially from the viewpoint of Islam. The movements and debates by these religious leaders elucidate how they engage with the leld of environment, which had hitherto been principally delned and organized by modern science. A case study from Tehran exempliles distinct ways in which moral dimensions of the environment are unfolding through religious ethics, along with the schemes of modern science.

Questioning Empathetic Responsiveness to Nonhuman Animal Vulnerability

2021-07-14T12:30:33+00:00

The author uses critical theorizations of empathy, compassion, and epistemology in order to draw out the limits of appeals to respond to nonhuman animal gazes in religious studies. Taking Aaron S. Gross’s and Donovan O. Schaefer’s recent works as exemplary, the author argues that empathetic postures towards vulnerability deny the potential violences of empathy and inadvertently reproduce the scholar as an ethical, conscious, and knowing subject. Instead, noninnocent framings of the relation of a scholar to her objects of study might allow religious studies to think more critically about the affective motivations of our desires to recognize the nonhuman animal and our epistemic limitations—especially in ways that do not presuppose the human/animal binary as a master binary whose collapse will entail the demise of racism, sexism, and colonialism.

Spirituality in Forest Management

2021-07-14T12:22:38+00:00

International forest policies are increasingly recognizing spiritual values as criteria for sustainable forest management. However, knowledge on how spiritual values are articulated in practice is scarce. Because most evidence remains anecdotal, the study of spiritual values in forest management remains unsystematized and under-theorized. Research is complicated by the widely diverging interpretations of the concept of spirituality in relation to forests. Drawing upon Saler’s family resemblances approach (2000 [1993]) and the dimensions of religion posed by Smart (1996, 2002), a framework with seven dimensions is proposed. The framework structures spiritual phenomena relevant to forest management so that they can be studied systematically. It attempts to accommodate the various ontologies and epistemologies connected to spirituality in forest management. We discuss the pros and cons of the framework and make recommendations for its application in the analysis of forest management plans and practices.

The Night Side of Nature

2021-07-14T12:11:20+00:00

The rise of the category of the paranormal in scholarship during the last decade calls for a historical genealogy of the term, if scholars are to continue to use it as both an analytic frame and an object of study. Such a genealogy shows that the paranormal derives from early modern and Renaissance environmental and cosmotheist beliefs and philosophies. Modern discourses of the paranormal are deeply coded forms of Renaissance cosmotheism and organicism, a coding accomplished through major intellectual stances on the category of ‘nature’ by lgures like Franz Mesmer, Friedrich W.J. Schelling, and Frederic W.H. Myers. The modern paranormal is an organic and ecological intellectual category of uncanny interrelation between subject and environment, and tracing its historical development demonstrates how organic environmental philosophies were shaped during and after the Enlightenment.

Mark I. Wallace, When God Was a Bird: Christianity, Animism, and the Re-Enchantment of the World

2021-07-14T12:38:05+00:00

Mark I. Wallace, When God Was a Bird: Christianity, Animism, and the Re-Enchantment of the World (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), 224 pp., $29.95 (pbk), ISBN: 9780823281312.

Demian Wheeler and David E. Conner (eds.), Conceiving an Alternative: Philosophical Resources for an Ecological Civilization

2021-07-14T12:51:19+00:00

Demian Wheeler and David E. Conner (eds.), Conceiving an Alternative: Philosophical Resources for an Ecological Civilization (Anoka: Process Century Press, 2019), 313 pp., $18.00 (pbk), ISBN: 978-1940447407.

Trevor Bechtel, Matthew Eaton, and Timothy Harvie (eds.), Encountering Earth: Thinking Theologically with a More-Than-Human World

2021-07-14T13:02:53+00:00

Trevor Bechtel, Matthew Eaton, and Timothy Harvie (eds.), Encountering Earth: Thinking Theologically with a More-Than-Human World (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2018), xxii + 254 pp., $33 (pbk), ISBN: 978-1-49829784-4.

Robert C. Bishop, Larry L. Funck, Raymond J. Lewis, Stephen O. Moshier, and John H. Walton, Understanding Scientilc Theories of Origins: Cosmology, Geology, and Biology in Christian Perspective

2021-07-14T13:11:43+00:00

Robert C. Bishop, Larry L. Funck, Raymond J. Lewis, Stephen O. Moshier, and John H. Walton, Understanding Scientilc Theories of Origins: Cosmology, Geology, and Biology in Christian Perspective (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2018), xxiv + 659pp., $75.00 (hbk), ISBN: 978-0-8308-5291-8.

Dina Gilio-Whitaker, As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock & Nick Estes, Our History is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance

2021-07-14T13:18:33+00:00

Dina Gilio-Whitaker, As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock (Boston: Beacon Press, 2019), 212 pp., $25.95 (hbk), ISBN: 9780807073780.

Nick Estes, Our History is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (London and New York: Verso, 2019), 310 pp., $26.95 (hbk), ISBN: 9781786636737.

James S. Mastaler, Woven Together: Faith and Justice for the Earth and the Poor

2021-07-14T13:24:03+00:00

James S. Mastaler, Woven Together: Faith and Justice for the Earth and the Poor (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2019), 148pp., $22.00 (pbk), ISBN: 978-1532661679.

Brett Malcolm Grainger, Church in the Wild: Evangelicals in Antebellum America

2021-07-14T13:31:49+00:00

Brett Malcolm Grainger, Church in the Wild: Evangelicals in Antebellum America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019), 280 pp., $45 (hbk).

Emma Frances Bloomleld, Communication Strategies for Engaging Climate Skeptics: Religion and the Environment

2021-07-14T13:39:19+00:00

Emma Frances Bloomleld, Communication Strategies for Engaging Climate Skeptics: Religion and the Environment (London and New York: Routledge, 2019), 182 pp., $140 (hbk), ISBN: 978-1-138-58593-5.

Francesca Ferrando, Philosophical Posthumanism

2021-07-14T13:50:25+00:00

Francesca Ferrando, Philosophical Posthumanism (London et al.: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), 296pp., $103.50 (pbk), ISBN: 978-1-3500-5950-4.