Authors:Lucas Johnston, Lisa Sideris, Joseph Witt Abstract: Special Issue Introduction: Religion, Science and the Future PubDate: 2017-11-29 Issue No:Vol. 11 (2017)
Authors:Fabrizio Frascaroli, Thora Fjeldsted Abstract: As the biodiversity crisis worsens, hopes rise that a substantial contribution to environmental care may come from the world’s religions. Such hopes largely rest on the expectation that the pro-environmental pronouncements of religious leaders, and their doctrinal underpinnings, will reach and affect a majority of believers. In this article, we discuss this argument, based on findings from fine-grained ethnographical and biological work among rural Catholic communities in Italy. We suggest that straightforward views of the link between religious doctrines and environmental care are problematic for three main reasons: postulating a deterministic link between values and behaviors that is disproven in reality; underplaying the inner heterogeneity of religions; and overlooking difficulties in value-transmission within religions. Accordingly, we suggest greater attention to concrete environmental outcomes, ritual, and the bodily dimension of religions, as a fundamental step toward a practice-oriented understanding of the nexus between religion and environment. PubDate: 2017-11-29 Issue No:Vol. 11 (2017)
Authors:Emma Tomalin Abstract: Despite its popularity and appeal for many, ecofeminism has been criticized for essentializing and romanticizing women’s roles as close to nature, thereby reproducing colonialist and biologically determinist discourses that contribute to discrimination. In response there have been attempts to defend ecofeminism, arguing that such critiques are hyperbolic and that we need ecofeminism more than ever (Philips and Rumens 2016). In a climate of renewed interest in ecofeminism, I ask why is it that some faith traditions are represented to a far greater extent in ecofeminist literature than others' I pick up on this discrepancy within ecofeminism’s engagement between different religions through examining Buddhist responses to gender and ecology. In the article I adopt a theory of ultramodern Buddhism, developed by Halafoff and Rajkobal (2015), to understand Buddhism in the contemporary era. Three main research questions are addressed: (1) to what extent has ‘green Buddhism’ been gendered'; (2) why has there has been virtually no attempt to bring together feminist analysis with responses to Buddhism and environmentalism' Why have they been approached separately'; and (3) in what ways are Buddhist women (and men) combining gender analysis and environmentalism in practice in reference to or outside the framework of ecofeminism' To better understand why a Buddhist ecofeminism has not been named and claimed by Buddhists in either the West or Asia, there is a need for local-level empirical studies that examine subjective understandings of relationships between gender and environmentalism in the lives of ultramodern Buddhist practitioners rather than assuming a standard ecofeminist position as the primary reference point. PubDate: 2017-11-24 Issue No:Vol. 11 (2017)
Authors:Lisa H. Sideris Abstract: Visions of a high-tech ‘good’ Anthropocene as well as ambitious world-making projects like Biosphere 2 have roots in a quasi-religious form of cosmism and attendant notions of the noosphere: a planetary sphere of mind. Cosmic perspectives often celebrate and naturalize an image of humans as participants in and ultimately directors of planetary and cosmic processes. This brand of cosmism encourages fantasies of fleeing our ‘used’ planet in search of our presumed interstellar destiny, and it encourages a disregard of earthly, ecological, and even bodily limits. I argue that the turn to planetary and cosmic perspectives is the wrong move for those who care about the future of the Earth and more-than human life. PubDate: 2017-11-16 Issue No:Vol. 11 (2017)
Authors:Timothy James LeCain Abstract: In recent years, scientists and humanists have begun converging towards a new concept of humanity, one in which human culture, creativity, and power are seen as the product of nature, not its antithesis. Drawing on these insights, I suggest some ways in which scholars might embrace the concept of the ‘natural born human' to better recognize the powerful role of the natural material world in creating the human past and future. If a vital materiality informs every aspect of who we are as humans, then the scientific insights into this material world are not distinct from or contrary to humanism. To the contrary, science might be better understood as a manner of humanism and perhaps even akin to a materially grounded religion. Thus the old divide between science and the humanities might now be closing as we better recognize the inescapable material nature of the human animal in all of its dimensions. PubDate: 2017-11-08 Issue No:Vol. 11 (2017)
Authors:Richard Samuel Deese Abstract: At the dawn of the scientific revolution, Francis Bacon declared its goal: to recover the estate of Adam and restore man's prelapsarian dominion over nature. Bacon's analogy makes little sense as a rationale for scientific inquiry, however, since Adam's distinguishing virtue in the opening verses of Genesis was his incurious obedience. The animating spirit of science has always been the impudent curiosity of Eve, who conversed with the serpent and dared, in defiance of the threat of death, to taste the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. As we apply the fruits of scientific inquiry to the creation of new technologies, this contrast between the mythical mother and father of our species takes on a fatal significance. If we aim to recover the estate of Adam we put science in the service of complacent comfort and an incurious domination of nature that will end in catastrophe. When we embrace the gospel of Eve, we engage in a conversation with nature that is inspired by that transcendent curiosity which Einstein identified as "the cosmic religious sense." Informed by this ethos, the fundamental goal of science is not to reclaim an impossible mastery over nature nor to banish death, but to deepen our engagement with life itself. PubDate: 2017-11-06 Issue No:Vol. 11 (2017)
Authors:Graham Harvey Abstract: Irving Hallowell’s conversation with an Anishinaabe (Ojibwa) elder in the early twentieth century has gained increasing attention in recent decades. It has been cited by many involved in the multi-disciplinary “turns” to ontology, materiality and relationality. In particular, it has inspired many researchers involved in the “new (approach to) animism”. This article considers efforts to rethink what “person” or “relation” might mean – in the light of Indigenous ontologies and of the ferment of reflection and analysis offered by many colleagues. It proposes that we have not yet sufficiently understood what the elder intended by telling Hallowell that only some stones are animate. A more radically relational understanding of personhood has implications for the ways in which we approach and engage with/in nature, culture, science and religion. PubDate: 2017-10-31 Issue No:Vol. 11 (2017)
Hybrid journal (It can contain Open Access articles)
