8. Affectual Insight

2020 ◽  
pp. 101-108
Author(s):  
David L. Haberman
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
Religion And Ecology ◽  
Forms Of Knowledge

Focusing on religion and ecology in Hinduism, this chapter elucidates the value of love and devotion as ways of connecting to the natural world. In contrast to the detachment that characterizes abstractly intellectual forms of knowledge, these ways of connecting to nature yield emotional or affective knowledge, which promotes care for the beauty and vulnerability of the natural world.

The Emerging Alliance of Religion and Ecology

1997 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Evelyn Tucker
Keyword(s):  
United Nations ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
Environmental Groups ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
Religion And Ecology ◽  
The United Nations ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractThe role of the world's religions may be crucial in rethinking the relationship of humans to the natural world in a mutually enhancing manner. I first acknowledge, although briefly, the scale and complexity of the environmental crisis. Next, I suggest the need for seeking common grounds to work toward a resolution of the crisis. Then I highlight the call for the co-operation and action of the world's religions from particular sectors such as environmental groups, the United Nations, political leaders, scientists, and ethicists. Finally, I document some of the responses and the resources of the world's religions in evoking new attitudes toward nature.

The Many Faces of a Himalayan Goddess

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ehud Halperin
Keyword(s):  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Ecological Change ◽  
The West ◽  
Religion And Ecology ◽  
Social Agent ◽  
Kullu Valley ◽  
Indian Village ◽  
The Many ◽  
Forms Of Knowledge

Haḍimbā is a major village goddess in the Kullu Valley of the West Indian Himalayan state of Himachal Pradesh, a mountainous, rural area known as the Land of Gods. This book is an ethnographic study of Haḍimbā and her dynamic, mutually formative relationship with her community of followers. It explores the part played by the goddess in her devotees’ lives, particularly in their encounters with players, powers, and ideas both local and external, such as invading royal forces, colonial forms of knowledge, and, more recently, modernity, capitalism, tourism, and ecological change. Haḍimbā is revealed as a complex social agent, a dynamic ritual and conceptual compound, which both mirrors her devotees and serves as a platform for them to reflect on, debate, give meaning to, and sometimes resist their changing realities. The goddess herself, it emerges, also changes in the process. Drawing on diverse ethnographic and textual materials gathered during periods of extensive fieldwork from 2009 to 2017, this study is rich with myths, accounts of dramatic rituals, and descriptions of everyday life in the region. The book employs an interdisciplinary approach to tell the story of Haḍimbā from the ground up, or rather from the center out, portraying the goddess in varying contexts that radiate outward from her temple to local, regional, national, and indeed global spheres. The resulting account makes an important contribution to the study of Indian village goddesses, lived Hinduism, Himalayan Hinduism, and the rapidly growing field of religion and ecology.

Cultural Botany: Toward a Model of Transdisciplinary, Embodied, and Poetic Research into Plants

2011 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-148 ◽  
Author(s):  
John C. Ryan
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Economic Botany ◽  
Environmental Studies ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Cultural Ecology ◽  
Transdisciplinary Research ◽  
Research Approach ◽  
Forms Of Knowledge

Since the eighteenth century, the study of plants has reflected an increasingly mechanized and technological view of the natural world that divides the humanities and the natual sciences. In broad terms, this article proposes a context for research into flora through an interrogation of existing literature addressing a rapprochement between ways to knowledge. The natureculture dichotomy, and more specifically the plant-to-human sensory disjunction, follows a parallel course of resolution to the schism between objective (technical, scientific, reductionistic, visual) and subjective (emotive, artistic, relational, multi-sensory) forms of knowledge. The foundations of taxonomic botany, as well as the allied fields of environmental studies, ethnobotany and economic botany, are undergirded by universalizing, sensorylimited visual structuring of the natural world. As the study of everyday embodied interactions of humans with flora, expanding upon the lens of cultural ecology, "cultural botany" provides a transdisciplinary research approach. Alternate embodied cultural engagements with flora emerge through a syncretic fusion of diverse methodologies.

Comparative Methods in Spatial Approaches to Religion

2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 311-322
Author(s):  
Whitney A. Bauman
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Felix Guattari ◽  
Religion And Science ◽  
Single Plane ◽  
Religion And Ecology ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Emergence Theory ◽  
Dependent Arising ◽  
Spatially Oriented

Recently, a number of methods for re-thinking ideas as part of the rest of the natural world (including religious ideas and values) have appeared on the religious studies landscape. Notions of emergence theory, new materialisms, and object-oriented ontologies are geared toward thinking about religion and science, ideas and nature, values and matter from within what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari call a “single plane” of existence. Others within the field of “religion and ecology/nature” are skeptical of these “postmodern” methods and theories. These skeptics claim that ideas from various religious traditions such as pantheism, panentheism, animism, and even co-dependent arising already do the intellectual work of re-thinking “religion and nature” together onto an immanent plane of existence. This article will begin to explore some of the links and differences between older traditions of thinking immanence with more recent post-modern moves toward spatially-oriented ways of thinking. Rather than being a final reflection on these connections and differences, this article calls for a more sustained comparative study of these different spatial approaches.

Nature and Modernity: J. C. Atkinson and Rural Ministry in England c. 1850–1900

2010 ◽  
Vol 46 ◽  
pp. 366-395
Author(s):  
William Sheils
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Extensive Literature ◽  
Rural Ministry ◽  
Religion And Ecology ◽  
Social Mission ◽  
The Social ◽  
Clean Air ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Rapid Transformation

The impact of industrialization and urbanization in the second half of the nineteenth century, and the Churches’ responses to it, in terms of meeting pastoral needs and devotional impulses, has produced an extensive literature since Owen Chadwick’s magisterial study of forty years ago. Much of that has focussed on the social mission of the Church, but the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species and the rapid transformation of parts of the physical landscape following industrialization and urbanization in the later nineteenth century also raised issues about humanity’s relationship to the natural world and in particular, for the purposes of this paper, the English countryside. Questions about that relationship have become even more pressing as industrialization has made a global impact and our use — and abuse — of the world’s natural resources threaten to deplete those life-giving assets upon which our future depends: clean air and clean water. Historians have much to contribute to the debate and the publication of The Oxford Handbook to Religion and Ecology in 2006 indicates the contemporary importance of the theme to theologians also.

Medicine

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pamela Klassen
Keyword(s):  
English Language ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Sacred Groves ◽  
Religion And Ecology ◽  
Creation Care ◽  
Nature Religion ◽  
Raymond Williams ◽  
Cultural Historian ◽  
Complex Words ◽  
Earth Charter

‘Nature,’ as cultural historian Raymond Williams asserted, is one of the most complex words in the English language. Just as its meanings have varied considerably over time, relations between religion belief/practice and the natural world have varied historically, geographically, and across multiple cultural contexts. ‘Nature’ and ‘religion’ have been co-articulated in different ways, and different interests and issues have been at stake in these changing constructions. Tropes of nature and the natural occur across a range of contexts: in Western study of non-Western religions, distinctions between ‘transcendent’ and ‘immanent’ cosmologies, and scholarly discourses of ‘religion and ecology,’ ‘nature religion,’ and debates over the ‘Lynn White thesis’; and in a series of popular religio-environmental developments including concepts and practices of Creation Care, eco-kosher livelihoods, sacred groves, the Green Pilgrims Cities network, the Earth Charter, and eco-paganism.

Contributions to Anthropocosmic Environmental Ethics

2007 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 226-247 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sam Mickey
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Ethics ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Religion And Ecology ◽  
Mircea Eliade

AbstractThis essay is an articulation of various contributions to anthropocosmic environmental ethics—an approach to environmental ethics emerging within the study of religion and ecology. In an anthropocosmic approach to environmental ethics, humans are intimately intertwined with the environment. Rather than placing value on a particular center (e. g., anthropocentric, biocentric, ecocentric) and thus excluding and marginalizing something of peripheral value, an anthropocosmic approach to ethics seeks to facilitate the mutual implication of humanity and the natural world, thereby affirming the interconnectedness and mutual constitution of central and peripheral value. Although the adjective "anthropocosmic" may seem obscure or vague, an examination of the genealogy of the term, beginning with its appearance in the works of Mircea Eliade, discloses numerous resources that have important contributions to make to the development of viable environmental ethics.

scholarly journals Naturalistic Entheogenics: Précis of Philosophy of Psychedelics

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Letheby
Keyword(s):  
Spiritual Growth ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Knowledge Gain ◽  
Therapeutic Benefits ◽  
Psychedelic Drugs ◽  
Promising Treatment ◽  
Main Ideas ◽  
Ultimate Nature ◽  
Forms Of Knowledge

In this précis I summarise the main ideas of my book Philosophy of Psychedelics . The book discusses philosophical issues arising from the therapeutic use of classic psychedelic drugs such as psilocybin and LSD. The book is organised around what I call the Comforting Delusion Objection to psychedelic therapy: the concern that this novel and promising treatment relies essentially on the induction of non-naturalistic metaphysical beliefs, rendering it epistemically (and perhaps, therefore, ethically) objectionable. In the book I develop a new response to this Objection which involves showing that a popular conception of psychedelics as agents of insight and spirituality is both consistent with a naturalistic worldview and plausible in light of current scientific knowledge. Exotic metaphysical ideas do sometimes come up, but they are not, on closer inspection, the central driver of change in psychedelic therapy. Psychedelics cause therapeutic benefits by altering the sense of self, and changing how people relate to their own minds and lives--not by changing their beliefs about the ultimate nature of reality. Thus, an "Entheogenic Conception" of psychedelics as agents of insight and spirituality can be reconciled with naturalism (the philosophical position that the natural world is all there is). Controlled psychedelic use can lead to genuine forms of knowledge gain and spiritual growth--even if no Cosmic Consciousness or divine Reality exists.

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