Religious Studies News

You might expect the theological and reform-oriented approach I have described from an ethicist, but it is certainly not the only way to study environment and religion. The pedagogy of my “Environmental Theologies” syllabus is more theological and more pragmatic than other good ways to teach the intersection of religious and environmental studies. Because Yale University hosts the Forum on Religion and Ecology, codirected by Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim, students also have the opportunity to take environmental courses that focus on Asian and indigenous traditions from teachers with a facility for interpreting how religions should transition toward an ecological cosmology. Together we can offer a range of courses that present students with several perspectives on how to think with religious and ecological ideas. In order to help students reflect together amidst our diverse perspectives, we host a periodic colloquium required of joint degree students and open to all students interested in the area of religion and ecology.   

I myself teach religious ideas differently in other divinity/forestry cross-listed courses. I teach an “Environmental Ethics” course, for example, in which religious approaches appear as one option among many normative frameworks for addressing environmental problems. There I use religious ideas to introduce a common, practical dilemma keenly felt by a rising generation of environmental professionals: should we work on problems within the modest possibilities offered by prevailing frameworks of civil debate, or should we work for the deep cultural changes offered in some cosmological alternatives or religious countervisions?

Other approaches to the intersection of religion and nature focus the methods of religious studies on a more descriptive approach to the earth-related religiosity that appears in popular culture and emergent spiritualities. Those approaches are especially helpful for renegotiating received categories of “religion” and “nature.” I once taught an undergraduate course at the University of Virginia by reading classics of nature writing alongside classic texts of religious studies (e.g., Henry David Thoreau with Mircea Eliade) and I think it opened young minds both to the religious dimensions of environmental sentiment and — more importantly — to the depth of human self-understanding involved in ways of relating to the more-than-human world.

For my graduate students, however, I am focused on cultivating aptitudes of participation in cultural reform. My pedagogical assumption is explicitly normative in that I assume that the leaders we are training must face complex environmental problems and that they need better ethical resources for doing so. I think these leaders and their communities can meet new problems pragmatically by developing new resources and inventing new capacities from their cultural inheritances.

“Environmental Theologies” exemplifies the particularity and pluralism those pedagogical assumptions require. It supposes that Christian communities invent new moral capacities through distinctive theological arguments. Constructive interaction with those communities, therefore, requires understanding their patterns of argument and the projects of reform they support.

By pressing students to interpret the variety emerging just from Christian communities, I invite them into an ethical task shared across traditions. If societies are to take responsibility for their interaction with ecological systems, they must find ways to inscribe the significance of environmental problems into ways of making sense of human experience. The particularism and pluralism of the course are signs of a reformist sensibility aimed at the heart of religious experience.