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Moving beyond identity politics while continuing to respect diverse entities and concerns, Whitney A. Bauman builds a planetary politics that better responds to the realities of a pluralistic world. Calling attention to the historical, political, and ecological influences shaping our understanding of nature, religion, humanity, and identity, Bauman collapses the boundaries separating male from female, biology from machine, human from more than human, and religion from science, encouraging readers to embrace hybridity and the inherent fluctuations of an open, evolving global community. As he outlines his planetary ethic, Bauman concurrently develops an environmental ethic of movement that rel...
Religion is much queerer than we ever imagined. Nature is as well. These are the two basic insights that have led to this volume: the authors included here hope to queerly go where no thinkers have gone before. The combination of queer theory and religion has been happening for at least 25 years. People such as John Boswell began to examine the history of religious traditions with a queer eye, and soon after we had the indecent theology of Marcella Althaus Ried. Jay Johnston, one of the authors in this issue, is among those who have used the queer eye to interrogate authority within Christian theological traditions. At the same time, there have been many queer interrogations of "nature," per...
This book offers a multidisciplinary environmental approach to ethics in response to the contemporary challenge of climate change caused by globalized economics and consumption. This book synthesizes the incredible complexity of the problem and the necessity of action in response, highlighting the unambiguous problem facing humanity in the 21st century, but arguing that it is essential to develop an ethics housed in ambiguity in response. Environmental Ethics and Uncertainty is divided into theoretical and applied chapters, with the theoretical sections engaging in dialogue with scholars from a variety of disciplines, while the applied chapters offer insight from 20th century activists who demonstrate and/or illuminate the theory, including Martin Luther King, Rachel Carson, and Frank Lloyd Wright. This book is written for scholars and students in the interdisciplinary field of environmental studies and the environmental humanities, and will appeal to courses in religion, philosophy, ethics, politics, and social theory.
How do religion and the natural world interact with one another? Grounding Religion introduces students to the growing field of religion and ecology, exploring a series of questions about how the religious world influences and is influenced by ecological systems. Grounding Religion examines the central concepts of ‘religion’ and ‘ecology’ using analysis, dialogical exchanges by established scholars in the field, and case studies. The first textbook to encourage critical thinking about the relationships between the environment and religious beliefs and practices, it also provides an expansive overview of the academic field of religion and ecology as it has emerged in the past forty ye...
Navigating Post-Truth and Alternative Facts: Religion and Science as Political Theology is an edited volume that explores the critical intersection of “religion-and-science” and our contemporary political and social landscape with a tailored eye towards the epistemological and hermeneutical impact of the “post-truth society.” The rise of the post-truth society has specific importance and inherent risk for nearly all academic disciplines and researchers. When personal beliefs regarding climate change trump scientific consensus, research projects are defunded, results are hidden or undermined, and all of us are at a greater vulnerability to extreme weather patterns. When expertise itself becomes suspect, we become a nation lead by fools. When data is overcome by alternative facts and truth in any form is suspect, where is the space for religious and/or scientific scholarship? The central curiosity of this volume is “what is the role of religion and science scholarship in a post-truth society?” This text explores truth, lies, fear, populism, politics, faith, the environment, post modernity, and our shared public life.
Winner of the John Templeton Award for Theological Promise, 2009 This book argues that the Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilo sets up a support system for a "logic of domination" over others. It follows a genealogical method in examining how the concept of creation out of nothing materializes in the world throughout different periods in the history of the Christian West.
This book borrows from the intellectual labor of queer theory in order to unsettle—or “queer”—the discourses of “religion” and “science,” and, by extension, the “science and religion discourse.” Drawing intellectual and social cues from works by influential theorists such as Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Eve Sedgwick, chapters in this volume converge on at least three common features of queer theory. First, queer theory challenges givens that on occasion still undergird religiously and scientifically informed ways of thinking. Second, it takes embodiment seriously. Third, this engagement inevitably generates new pathways for thinking about how religious and scientific “truths” matter. These three features ultimately lend support to critical investigations into the meanings of “science” and “religion,” and the relationships between the two.
Globalization and climate weirding are two of the leading phenomena that challenge and change the way we need to think and act within the planetary community. Modern Western understandings of human beings, animals, and the rest of the natural world and the subsequent technologies built on those understandings have thrown us into an array of social and ecological crises with planetary implications. In Earthly Things: Immanence, New Materialisms, and Planetary Thinking, we argue that more immanent or planetary ways of thinking and acting have great potential for re-thinking human-technology-animal-earth relationships and for addressing problems of global climate weirding and other forms of eco...
This collection offers new perspectives on the study of science and religion, bringing together articles that highlight the differences between epistemological systems and call into question the dominant narrative of modern science. The volume provides historical context for the contemporary discourse around religion and science, detailing the emergence of modern science from earlier movements related to magic and other esoteric arts, the impact of the Reformation on science, and the dependence of Western science on the so-called Golden Age of Islam. In addition, contributors examine the impacts of Western science and colonialism on the ongoing theft of the biological resources of traditional and indigenous communities in the name of science and medicine. The volume’s multi-perspectival approach aims to refocus the terms of the conversation around science and religion, taking into consideration multiple rationalities outside of the dominant discourse.
Bauman urges us to think in new ways about a newly flexible, newly challenging modern world. In an era of routine travel, where most people circulate widely, the inherited beliefs that aid our thinking about the world have become an obstacle. He challenges members of the “knowledge class” to overcome their estrangement from the rest of society.