Dispatches From the Rhodian Shore: A (Tough) Love Letter to Religious Studies
When writing as critical scholars of religion about the impacts and role of religion in…
Read Moreecology
Elephant Orphans and Ecological Spiritualities: An Earth Day Reflection
It is a mild Kenyan day. With temperatures in the 70s, I smile with some Lutheran guilt because I know I am missing the worst of Minnesota’s frosty brunt of the so-called “polar vortex” (climate change in action). At this moment, instead of curling up with blankets…
Read More
Francis Now and Then: The Ecological Politics of Saints
Today we are a great distance from the ecological situation of medieval Italy. With the aid of capital and industry, we humans have become so practiced, and coldly efficient, in matters of animal domestication that we now have health insurance on offer for wealthy domestic pets while billions of other creatures in our care are heedlessly slaughtered. Our domestication practices are a mess.
Read More
A Superhuman Spirituality: Ang Lee’s Life of Pi
“I have a story that will make you believe in God,” an elderly man tells the narrator of Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi (2001). This is the opening of a very tall tale, one that’s designed to chasten the reader’s skepticism.
Read More
Losing Old Gods, Finding Nature
Ten questions for Bron Taylor, whose latest book Dark Green Religion holds that traditional religions are gradually being replaced by more sensory forms of spirituality which promote more sensible, ecologically adaptive behaviors.
Read More
War of the Worldviews: Why Avatar Lost
Avatar had audiences rooting for nature, against the destruction of marauding tanks—but the Oscar went to the film that offered a soldier’s-eye view.
Read More
No Garden to Get Back to: Understanding Post-Avatar Ecological Depressive Disorder
It may be only a movie, but it is turning significant segments of its audience into eco-radicals. We can go ahead and dissect the film’s weaknesses, but as our planet dies, and politicians fail, is this really how we want to talk about the most influential ecological parable of our time?
Read More
What Good is a Morality That Doesn’t Encompass All Life on Earth?
The way we live will lead, inevitably, to the extinction of half of the planet’s biodiversity by century’s end. How can our morality, or our religion, prepare us for this?
Read MoreThe Great Cremation Debate
Cremation is increasingly acceptable to Jews but is it as ecologically friendly as we’re led to believe?
Read More
RDPulpit: Nature Worship: A Primer
We have failed, as a society—for millennia—to ascribe worth to the one sustaining gift of the universe that we touch and feel every day: the earth itself. Rex Weyler, co-founder of Greenpeace, has an Earth Day message about ecology, community, and spirit.
Read More