Teaching Scriptures and Ecology

Any course in religion and ecology can include some discussion of foundational texts, including a critical reading of the literary portrayal of other-than-humans. This article will focus on teaching scriptures and ecology as illustrated in a course entitled “The Bible and the Environment,” which introduces students to an ecojustice reading of the Christian Bible and secondary sources. The article also concerns my adaptation of Felder and Brent’s recommendations for encouraging students to actively engage in class discussion. Since I wanted to introduce more written reflection, I adapted their methods to giving pop quizzes at the beginning, middle, and end of some class sessions. This proved successful in that students were better prepared for class, were more attentive participants in class discussion, and had better comprehension of content, including the ability to apply the concepts of anthropocentrism and ecocentrism to primary and secondary sources.

Spiritual Ecology: On the Way to Ecological Existentialism

Spiritual ecology is closely related to inquiries into religion and ecology, religion and nature, and religious environmentalism. This article presents considerations of the unique possibilities afforded by the idea of spiritual ecology. On one hand, these possibilities include problematic tendencies in some strands of contemporary spirituality, including anti-intellectualism, a lack of sociopolitical engagement, and complicity in a sense of happiness that is captured by capitalist enclosures and consumerist desires. On the other hand, spiritual ecology promises to involve an existential commitment to solidarity with nonhumans, and it gestures toward ways of knowing and interacting that are more inclusive than what is typically conveyed by the term “religion.” Much work on spiritual ecology is broadly pluralistic, leaving open the question of how to discern the difference between better and worse forms of spiritual ecology. This article affirms that pluralism while also distinguishing between the anti-intellectual, individualistic, and capitalistic possibilities of spiritual ecology from varieties of spiritual ecology that are on the way to what can be described as ecological existentialism or coexistentialism.

The Importance of Religion for the Evaluation of Everyday Ecological Decisions by German Adolescents

Although previous research has addressed the relationship between religion and ecology in a variety of ways, little is known concerning how religious orientation affects concrete everyday ecological decisions, although these are centrally important for environmental education. Being interested in elucidating the preconditions of ecological learning in Biology and Religious Education in schools, the authors have developed an approach based on maximum concretion with regard to the ecological decision in which the influence of religion should be evaluated. With this goal in mind, they conducted an empirical study among secondary school students in central Western Germany (N = 815), who were confronted with an everyday ecological dilemma and asked about their reasons for evaluating this situation. The results provide insight into the potential role of German young people’s religious orientations in ecological matters and call for a decisive profiling of how cross-disciplinary education can contribute to this key question for future.

Embodied/Virtual Environments

This article by no means serves to account for theories on virtual technologies or virtual design but, rather, offers a distinct exploration on the role of the body in virtual experiences and spaces. Selected works account for embodiment literature and emergent considerations of the body in what may be considered a post-body, or post-human, era of technology, connectivity, and communications. This list includes work that researches, discusses, or questions notions of virtual with regard to landscapes of experience and that looks to discourses on the role of the body in human perception. With implications for larger questions regarding the human mind, and apart from dualistic conversations on mind-body connections, embodiment theories view the body as a tool for participation in lifeworlds. Embodiment is inherently a social concept, and one that rests on foundational understandings of human evolution and adaptation as well as human sociability and socialization, sometimes explored as ecosocial phenomena. Conjuring many inquiries in biology, cognition, psychology, ethics, philosophy, religion, and ecology, this collection is composed mostly of work in the humanities and social sciences and is skewed by traditions in anthropology. It is generally well accepted that cultural perspectives inform human knowledge, but theories in embodiment ask how social and cultural conditions inform not only perspectives, but also experiences or felt senses (or both). Questions of materiality give way to attention on the physical, earthly environment to which humans have evolved and with which humans have coadapted. Scholars have referred to this era as the Anthropocene, which ultimately points to human dilemma, since human behavior is defined by progressively more destructive behavior that yields an earth on which humans cannot rely for resources. Simultaneously, media, entertainment, and design technology have moved into virtual reality and augmented experiences that either transcend, mimic, or escape earthly realms or physical limitations. Simulated or virtual experiences make use of what we know about human perception to create new forms of reality. Theories of being and knowing, inherent to the anthropological canon, pose examination of bodily knowledge and bring about inquiry in medicine, disability studies, cognition, and health, to name a few. Mediated and augmented experiences have all manner of applications and implications, including overriding biology and genetics, posing questions for the future of the human condition. This article includes new work from science journals and popular media to illustrate how new human adaptations, ecologies, and virtual perceptions interface with embodiment.

8. Affectual Insight

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 Many Faces of a Himalayan Goddess

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.

Explicit and Embedded Environmentalism

The precise influence that religious outlooks have on environmental attitudes and behaviors is a matter of debate among scholars of religion and ecology. While some studies suggest that emergent ecofriendly interpretations of traditional religions offer a promising path for addressing the world’s ecological crisis, others advance more skeptical evaluations about institutional religions’ efficacy in advancing sustainability efforts. In this article I seek to shift the terms of this debate. Whether scholars suggest there is a correlation or insist there is not, these arguments envision environmentalism based on the model of the mainstream, white American environmental movement, assuming that religious environmentalism must entail explicit, concerted efforts to protect the earth. This assumption has led scholars to overlook embedded environmental expressions that are conveyed theologically rather than politically, especially among communities that do not identify with mainstream American environmentalism. By interrogating the assumption that religious environmentalism must involve concerted, political efforts, scholars of religion and ecology can better account for the ways religion influences environmental attitudes and behaviors among religious communities who are not affluent and white.

CHRISTIANITY AND ECOLOGY A CRITICAL STUDY ON THE CONTRIBUTION OF SDA THEOLOGY TOWARD ECOLOGY

To date, the controversial publication of Lynn White Jr’s article, The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis (1967) ignites the fierce debate between theologian and academia in the field of religion and ecology about the guilt of Western Christianity toward modern ecological calamity. Meanwhile, as a Christian denomination that highly emphasizes on the second coming (the Advent) and the next life, Seventh-Day Adventist (SDA) Church doctrine is frequently accused as the reason why Christianity doctrine tend to put aside today’s environmental problem and more focused in the eternal next life. Though, at the same time, SDA Church also known for its emphasis on holistic life as well as one of the most advanced church in health and medical science. Given those handicap, the research tries to challenge those common perceptions about Christianity and ecology right into the heart of its criticism. By using literature-based research as methodology, this paper scrutinizes the doctrine of SDA church within the context of ecology as well as demonstrates how the SDA Church manifests its ecological doctrines. Furthermore, on wider discourse of religion and ecology, the explorations on SDA theology shows that rather than becoming a source of problem, the eschatological doctrine might become the driven-factor toward ecological practices nowadays.