Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture

Rejecting Racism, Restoring Intuition

Russell C Powell — 2023-01-03

John Muir continues to influence Americans to see the natural world as replete with sacred value. Yet Muir’s work is not without its shadow side: Muir’s racism against Indigenous peoples permeates his writing. I locate both the valuable and vile views inherent in Muir’s moral vision in his uncritical reliance on Romantic epistemology, and particularly the recourse Muir continually made to the power of his intuition. Applying insights from G. W. F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, I offer an account of the various roles Muir’s intuitions played in his thinking so as to better contextualize the best and worst features of his moral thought.

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Anthropology

Emily Dumler-Winckler — 2023-01-03

Until recently, popular presumption and scholarly consensus have cautioned against using Emerson as a constructive resource for eco-justice. Emerson’s views of nature, race, and gender as well as his involvement in the abolitionist and women’s movements of the nineteenth century have been a source of ongoing debate. At a time when concerns about social justice and equity have rightly become prominent in eco-justice, scholars of theology, religion, and ecology may wonder whether Ralph Waldo Emerson is best used, if at all, as a foil. Emerson’s anthropology and his reception history are both, at points, deficient. Nevertheless, because justice and love are central to his theological anthropology, he provides a resource for thinking about right relations among human beings and the
natural world. This anthropology provides a way beyond the false binary between anthropocentrism and ecocentrism that continues to haunt environmental ethics.

Reading Thoreau in the 21st Century

Rebecca Kneale Gould — 2023-02-18

This essay offers a critical re-assessment of Henry David Thoreau’s life and legacy in the context of contemporary critiques of the mainstream environmental tradition. It takes seriously concerns raised about Thoreau’s status as a privileged white male, but calls for more nuance. In particular, the essay challenges those portraits of Thoreau that emphasize Thoreau’s status as a devotee of American nature religion to the exclusion of Thoreau’s significant contributions as an abolitionist and as a prescient critic of an emergent culture of consumption that relied on slavery for its success. The essay assesses the ambivalent legacies that Thoreau left in his wake, demonstrating those moments when Thoreau’s public life as a social critic chafed against his most deeply held spiritual orientations and practices. This essay also argues for the necessity of reading and teaching Thoreau side-by-side with the work of Black writers whose renderings of human-nature relationships both resonate with and depart from Thoreau’s Transcendentalist vision.

Resource Management

Russell C Powell — 2023-01-03

Annual List of Reviewers

Amanda Nichols — 2022-12-22