Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture

Special Issue Introduction

2021-03-31T14:14:48+00:00

Special Issue Introduction

Gender, Land, and Place

2021-03-31T14:23:03+00:00

Considering how gender operates within land-based and place-based learning is critical as both human and more-than-human relations and relationships have been heavily shaped and regulated by settler colonialism and settler heteropatriarchy. The deterioration of Indigenous notions of gender and the forceful colonial imposition of a Western gender binary has served to fracture Indigenous peoples' relationships with Land.

Critical Planetary Romanticism

2021-03-31T14:34:11+00:00

Queer Theory (QT) has expanded since the 1990s beyond critiques of normative understandings of gender and sex, to a broader critique of normative thinking in general. The destabilizing force of QT has been utilized to critique understandings of ‘nature’, highlighting how nature is a historically constructed and changing category. This article puts queer theorists into dialogue with ‘critically romantic’ scientists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Though not often thought of as ‘queer’ critically romantic scientists such as Ernst Haeckel understood that ‘nature’, from an ecological and evolutionary standpoint, was an unstable category. Using these earlier thinkers in dialogue with QT, I bring queer thinking back to nature in an erotics of thought, or what I call a critical planetary romanticism (CPR). A CPR opens us on to the evolving and entangled planetary community and the co-construction of the planetary grounds of our own thought.

Architecture, Religion, and the Forms of Nature in Turn-of-the-Twentieth-Century Chicago

2021-03-31T14:40:36+00:00

The commercial architectural style that emerged in Chicago in the late nineteenth-century United States constituted a material gathering point for that century’s masculinities, religious histories, and conceptions of nature. This was especially true in the case of Louis Henri Sullivan (1856–1924), an inmuential lgure in crafting the aesthetic of this ‘Chicago School’ of architectural practice. Drawing on transcendentalist literature and recent innovations in architectural design, Sullivan outlined an ‘organic’ theory of architecture made famous in his pithy expression: form follows function. His design and theorization of free-standing structures offered gendered forms as the constitutive vocabulary of American architecture, with those very forms—not just the skyscraper but the free-standing structure writ-large—governing the relation of nature and its spirit to the masculinized landscape of urban commercial expansion. In Sullivan’s work, the gendered body became the vehicle for natural laws, both material and divine.

Converting the Masses

2021-03-31T14:48:57+00:00

Drawing on the work of Naomi Wolf who described a transition in commercial advertising inspired by the feminist movement, I examine the ways commercial marketing strategies have changed in the wake of the election of Donald Trump and the #MeToo movement. This shift illuminates the ideological functions of advertisements with regard to understandings of gender and nature. Employing Benson Saler’s family resemblances approach, and further drawing on the work of David Chidester and Katheryn Lofton I show that advertisements function in religion-resembling ways in pop culture. By examining a number of corporate advertisements between 2004 and 2019, I show a shift in some corporations’ marketing strategies in light of political tensions concerning sexual harassment and climate change in the United States. These changing strategies also represent a call to action by forming community around shared causes, urging consumers to choose wisely and think about something bigger than themselves.

Michael S. Hogue, American Immanence: Democracy for an Uncertain World

2021-03-31T15:08:08+00:00

Michael S. Hogue, American Immanence: Democracy for an Uncertain World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 256 pp., $30.00 (pbk), ISBN: 9780231172332.

David L. McConnell and Marilyn D. Loveless, Nature and the Environment in Amish Life

2021-03-31T15:22:10+00:00

David L. McConnell and Marilyn D. Loveless, Nature and the Environment in Amish Life (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), xiv+294 pp., $49.95 (pbk), ISBN: 9781421426167.

Nicola Hoggard Creegan and Andrew Shepherd (eds.), Creation and Hope: Remections on Ecological Anticipation and Action from Aotearoa New Zealand

2021-03-31T15:26:19+00:00

Nicola Hoggard Creegan and Andrew Shepherd (eds.), Creation and Hope: Remections on Ecological Anticipation and Action from Aotearoa New Zealand (Eugene: Pickwick Publications, 2018), 230pp., $22.40 (pbk), ISBN: 978153260973.

Rosalind Fredericks, Garbage Citizenship: Vital Infrastructures of Labor in Dakar, Senegal

2021-03-31T15:32:44+00:00

Rosalind Fredericks, Garbage Citizenship: Vital Infrastructures of Labor in Dakar, Senegal (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2018) xi+200 pp., $23.95 (pbk), ISBN: 978-1-4780-0141-6.

Francesca Ciancimino Howell, Food, Festival and Religion: Materiality and Place in Italy

2021-03-31T15:38:12+00:00

Francesca Ciancimino Howell, Food, Festival and Religion: Materiality and Place in Italy (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 224 pp., $114.00 (hbk), ISBN: 978-1-3500-2086-3.

Luke Whitmore, Mountain, Water, Rock, God: Understanding Kedarnath in the Twenty-first Century

2021-03-31T15:44:02+00:00

Luke Whitmore, Mountain, Water, Rock, God: Understanding Kedarnath in the Twenty-first Century (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2018), 258 pp., $34.95 (pbk), ISBN: 978-0520298026.

Kenneth Worthy, Elizabeth Allison, and Whitney A. Bauman (eds.), After the Death of Nature: Carolyn Merchant and the Future of Human–Nature Relations

2021-03-31T15:49:38+00:00

Kenneth Worthy, Elizabeth Allison, and Whitney A. Bauman (eds.), After the Death of Nature: Carolyn Merchant and the Future of Human–Nature Relations (New York and London: Routledge, 2019), xxii + 308 pp., $195.00 (cloth), $44.95 (pbk), ISBN: 978-1- 138-29731-9.

Elizabeth McAnally, Loving Water Across Religions: Contributions to an Integral Water Ethic

2021-03-31T15:54:15+00:00

Elizabeth McAnally, Loving Water Across Religions: Contributions to an Integral Water Ethic (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2019), 180 pp., $26.00 (pbk), ISBN: 978-1-62698-307-6.

Elizabeth Hoover, The River Is in Us: Fighting Toxics in a Mohawk Community

2021-03-31T15:58:36+00:00

Elizabeth Hoover, The River Is in Us: Fighting Toxics in a Mohawk Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 392 pp., $112.00 (cloth), ISBN: 978- 1-5179-0302-2.

Michael M. Bell, City of the Good: Nature, Religion, and the Ancient Search for What Is Right

2021-03-31T16:03:16+00:00

Michael M. Bell, City of the Good: Nature, Religion, and the Ancient Search for What Is Right (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 340 pp., $35 (hbk), ISBN: 9781400887934.