Issue Editors: Ellen Posman, Baldwin-Wallace College, and Reid B. Locklin, University of Toronto

Ellen Posman is an associate professor of religion at Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea, Ohio. She holds degrees in religious studies from Stanford University, Harvard University, and the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her expertise lies in the area of comparative religion, with specializations in Buddhism and Judaism. Posman can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Reid B. Locklin holds a joint appointment in Christianity and culture at Saint Michael’s College and at the Centre for the Study of Religion, both at the University of Toronto. A graduate of Boston University and Boston College, he is the author of Spiritual but Not Religious? (Liturgical Press, 2005) and other works in comparative theology, Christian ecclesiology, and spirituality. Locklin currently serves as president of the Society for Hindu–Christian Studies and as cochair of the AAR’s Comparative Theology Group. He can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Teaching Religion and Ecology: From the Abstract to the Personal, From Despair to Hope

The ecological health of planet Earth is arguably the most crucial issue facing humankind in the twenty-first century. Proponents of ecoliteracy and the ecopedagogy movement are clear that the ecological knowledge and education that motivate students toward ecological justice are imperatives throughout all disciplines in the academy (e.g., Kahn 2010; Orr 2004). The following articles detail possibilities for teaching ecology within the disciplines of theological and religious studies at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Due to the assiduous effort and insight of these individual contributors — and especially of guest editor Whitney Bauman — this issue of Spotlight offers a wide range of pedagogical techniques and course designs for numerous types of institutions in a variety of geographic settings.

The teaching strategies offered in this issue vary widely, from the introduction of new knowledge to inquiry-based learning, from kinesthetic learning to performative learning to service-learning, yet all have a few things in common. First, each article suggests a unique way to create a destabilizing experience intended to transform students’ understanding of, and relation to, the natural world. Second, each instructor finds a way to make abstract issues of religion and ecology intensely personal. In most cases, the goal is a practical one that leads to new personal, professional, or political commitments. Whether located inside or outside the classroom, teaching about the environment in religious perspective accomplishes numerous learning goals simultaneously: it provides a lens through which to look at theological or religious issues, it challenges students to reorient themselves, and it raises ethical issues about our responsibility to the planet and to society. Simply providing knowledge about environmental issues and the current global crisis can discourage or even paralyze students, overwhelming them or fostering an attitude of despair (see Kaza 1999). Hence, the strategies offered here attempt to encourage hope and commitment to change by personalizing the environmental issues, connecting students emotionally to the natural world, and creating opportunities for them to formulate personal and communal solutions (on this issue, see especially Bauman’s Guest Editor Introduction).

Teaching Religion and Ecology: In the Classroom

Interestingly, each article in this issue of Spotlight approaches the teaching of religion and ecology with a unique pedagogical practice. Isabel Mukonyora, Willis Jenkins, and Whitney Bauman focus more on in-class possibilities, while Carol S. Robb, Bobbi Patterson, and Laura Stivers insist on moving students outside of the classroom space. Nevertheless, each technique offers its own pathway toward a destabilizing experience that can make room for a process of transformational learning (Mezirow 2000). For Mukonyora, it becomes important to lead students away from a Western anthropocentric viewpoint by introducing concepts from cultures lesser known to American students. She challenges students to “widen their horizons” through the Shona concept of Mai Vedu, a more biocentric than anthropocentric understanding of religion. One general goal of environmental pedagogy is to move students from an anthropocentric to biocentric understanding of life (see Orr 2004), and Mukonyora begins this process through her definition of the fundamental category “religion” itself. As she says, “students [learn to] recognize something found in religious traditions from cultures far away from their own. That ‘something’ is the teaching that humans belong to a biotic community whose ‘intelligences’ need to be taken seriously on the terms that different religions use to articulate them.”

Additional goals of ecoliteracy include a move from neat answers to complex questions, and Bauman does just that, using an inquiry-based exercise to compel his students to look beyond the notion of technology as the answer to the environmental crisis and to investigate the ecological footprint of technological devices themselves. This, too, presents a destabilizing experience, as Bauman challenges students to see technology in new ways — most importantly, as a part of nature and a mediator of culture. By focusing on one personal item and by seeing its lifecycle, environmental issues are made personal and students are encouraged to make personal choices that involve what he calls, quoting Nancy Bedford (2002), “little moves” against destructiveness.

In Jenkins’s course, divinity and forestry students each encounter different kinds of destabilizing experiences as they are pressed to see the variety of Christian theologies as they relate to the environment, moving them away from the idea that there is one normative position on Christian environmental theology. Jenkins’s teaching strategy serves a dual purpose of understanding the pluralism within Christianity and moving towards the practical and political application of constructive environmental theology. Ultimately, the students are asked, “How could this strategy use the challenge of climate change to make its theological tradition more capable of generating meaningful responses to the problem?” Though the question is articulated in a way specific to the divinity school context and this particular cross-listed course, it also resonates with questions posed in all of the courses profiled here.

Teaching Religion and Ecology: In the World

Moving out of the classroom can also be a useful method for approaching the teaching of ecology and religion. A focus on experiential education and community projects can connect students emotionally to the environment and help to move them from feelings of despair to empowerment (Kaza 1999). So it comes as no surprise that a number of the authors here attempt to foster experiential learning in different ways.

Bobbi Patterson perhaps takes the most holistic perspective on such experiential learning, requiring that students engage themselves in a particular place outside the classroom, to develop a relationship with that place, and to utilize “performative learning” in combination with “reflective, contemplative pedagogies” (Zajonc, 2006). In this way, she encourages students to understand the environment in a lived, emotionally engaged, and thoroughly embodied way. Carol S. Robb’s strategy, on the other hand, focuses students’ attention on a project that they participate in as a community, mitigating despair by working together, improving the campus environment, and experiencing physical labor. This kinesthetic learning, in turn, raises still further issues related to international student populations and their home cultures’ notions regarding manual labor.

Like Isabel Mukonyora, Robb thus goes beyond environmental literacy and even ecological justice to also include general learning about society and structural inequality. The close connection between ecological justice and economic injustice comes into particularly sharp focus in Laura Stivers’s environmental philosophy and ethics course at Pfeiffer University. Relying on literature about the educational benefits of service-learning (e.g., Devine, Favazza, and McLain 2002; Ward 1999; O’Grady 2002), Stivers involves her students in a service-learning project in West Virginia that introduces them to the environmental and economic complexities of mountaintop removal, allows them to act in a community, and empowers them to avoid despair. Stivers sums up the gist of the teaching strategies here as she notes, “Students can get a bit overwhelmed both by the philosophical theory, the interdisciplinary nature, and the amount of expertise needed to comprehend different environmental issues. Finding concrete and experiential ways to motivate passion on the issues and to instill a thirst for learning more and connecting to theoretical resources is crucial.”

Each of these strategies seeks to provide an opportunity for transformational learning by disrupting students’ everyday consciousness but then providing an opportunity to move from a sense of overwhelming despair at the ecological crisis to a sense of hope, and an opportunity to make a personal, communal, or political change through a change in consciousness and more intentional choices. The variety of possibilities detailed in this issue amply demonstrate that “religion and ecology” is not the exclusive responsibility of a particular subdiscipline of the field or a particular course: it can be introduced through a variety of strategies — large and small — in a range of courses across the disciplines of religious studies and theology.

Suggested Resources

Spotlight on Teaching: “Religion and Ecology”

Guest Editor: Whitney A. Bauman, Florida International University

Whitney A. Bauman is assistant professor of religion and science at Florida International University in Miami. His publications include Theology, Creation, and Environmental Ethics: From Creatio ex Nihilo to Terra Nullius (New York: Routledge, 2009) and, coedited with Richard Bohannon and Kevin O’Brien, Grounding Religion: A Field Guide to the Study of Religion and Ecology (New York: Routledge, 2010). Bauman currently serves as co-Chair of the Religion and Ecology Group at the American Academy of Religion and as book review editor for Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture, and Ecology. He teaches courses such as “Technology and Human Values,” “Religion, Nature, and Globalization,” and “Religion, Gender, and Nature.” Bauman’s current research is in the area of religion, nature, and queer theory.

Like most subdisciplines within religious studies, the field of “religion and ecology” — and also “religion and nature” — is multidisciplinary and hence employs multiple methods of inquiry. One commonality of the methods employed within the field is that they are aimed at uncovering ways in which our religious ideas, beliefs, values, and histories become embodied, whether we are talking about one of the major world religious traditions or emerging religious practices. In other words, they focus our attention on how religions materialize in the world and affect human bodies, the bodies of the more-than-human world, and the exchanges of materials and energies between bodies. Most often, such reflection is not done with the goal of acquiring mere facts or aggregating disengaged knowledge in mind.

Similar to “women’s studies,” religion and ecology/nature has a normative aim, which is to understand the implications of religions and value systems for human–earth relations so that we can begin to think and act in ways that will bring about a better planetary future for the ongoing, evolving process of life on planet Earth. In other words, people who teach “religion and ecology” don’t teach students how to better use religions to exploit the earth’s resources. Another similarity to women’s studies is that the goal of religion and ecology is to become such an integral part of syllabi across the curriculum so that there will no longer be a need for the field. Though the past forty or so years of religion and ecology work has done a lot to move in this direction, there is still a great need for the teaching of this subject within religious studies and theology curricula today. 

In what follows, six different instructors offer their own insights from teaching some aspect of “religion and ecology.” Some teach whole courses devoted to the topic, others teach whole courses devoted to a subtopic within the subdiscipline, and still others teach only a unit or two of religion and ecology within a much broader course. The institutional settings of these teachers are also quite diverse. They include a public university, private university, seminary, and liberal arts college. These contexts are important as the face of religion and ecology looks different from the context in which it is taught. Another mark of diversity — other than race, gender, and age — that may be especially important for an issue on religion and ecology is the geographical and topographical diversity from which these articles emerge. From urban to rural, coastal to inland, mountainous to flat, hot to cold, local to transnational, the geographic places from which these articles emerge are important both theoretically and pedagogically. 

Even with all of these differences, there is at least one common theme that ties all of these articles together — the importance of embodiment. Some entries — Robb and Patterson — focus on how the experiences of organic gardening or within a specific “place” in nature can lead to an embodied understanding of some of the more “spiritual” connections we have with the rest of the natural world. These “more than intellectual” engagements with the rest of the natural world begin to unhinge some assumptions about human exceptionalism and anthropocentric understandings of the world. Other entries — Jenkins and Stivers — focus on how specific ecological problems such as climate change or mountaintop removal can change one’s religious understanding of the rest of the natural world and challenge the silence of religious peoples in the face of such problems. How does climate change affect one’s understanding of deity, "Good," "Justice," etc.? How does confronting firsthand the destruction caused by mountaintop removal help students understand at a bodily level the connections between environmental degradation and social injustice? Still other articles ask students to examine the ways in which the contemporary process of globalization affects religious identity and understandings of nature (Mukonyora), or how technological developments change what it means to be human vis à vis the rest of the natural world (Bauman). Together, these techniques suggest how one can approach teaching students about “religion and ecology/nature” in more than just an intellectual way. 

Though not explicit in each article, I suspect that another common factor of the teaching practices described in this issue is that they in some way address students’ experiences of being overwhelmed and falling into despair. I would imagine that students and scholars of Holocaust studies, anthropologists cataloging dying languages, psychologists focused on death and dying, and perhaps a few others face such overwhelming feelings as those facing global climate change, species extinction, environmental injustice, and other issues of ecological degradation and injustice. This despair has marked the field from its beginning. At times it can lead to apocalyptic-style declarations, at times prophetic acts, and still at other times denial. Regardless, both teachers and students of religion and ecology/nature have to come up with coping mechanisms. Teaching methods that involve embodiment can be a useful tool in addressing despair and helplessness. 

As most religions teach hope in the face of the impossible, so gardening, choosing “green” technologies, confronting specific issues, becoming vegetarian, and other embodied responses to ecological ills can help ground a sense of hope in the face of future uncertainty. Not the naïve hope that one act, solution, individual, or classroom can “save the world” — not one of these teaching techniques claims easy answers, nor do they claim that their given approach or solution to a problem is the thing that is going to save the world. Rather, the goal is to foster a sense of being a part of a larger earth community and a part of the solution to these overwhelming problems. In the end, the goal of these problems is to help students learn, in an embodied way, how and why religions matter in and to the world around us. If they do shape our interactions with the rest of the natural world, then surely we can at least critically examine how they do so. I thank all of the contributors of this issue for doing just that, and to the editors for allowing us to share these insights with the wider AAR community.