"In [book title] [author] employs powerful and vivid stories from Holy Scriptures and from the rich history of Chrisian wilderness spirituality to illustrate a tradition of reverential Christian attitudes toward nature. ... [author] features exemplary heroines and heroes who directly encounter and more clearly discern the Divine in the wilderness. There they experience extraordinary Providence and mercy, they are led through spiritual transitions, they hear God's call, they face crises, they find freedom from ungodly cultural forces, and they develop a more profound receptiveness to the Divine mysteries."--Back cover.

Landscape where the divine may be most clearly discerned and directly encountered. Comparing several different Old Testament models of wilderness experience, the first chapters investigate such diverse incidents as Hagar's meeting with the angel at the desert spring, Moses and the elders of Israel viewing God through the sapphire floor, Jonathan and his armor bearer climbing the rocks to rout the Philistine garrison, and Elijah fleeing to a cave at Horeb. Wilderness.

Since the passage of the Wilderness Act of 1964, a hotly contested debate over the value of wilderness reveals cultural anxieties about an American society that has spurned limits. Gratitude for the Wild explores how the wild known in wilderness raises our tolerance for mystery in the recognition of our limits and in the celebration of a God-loved world that exceeds our grasping. The idea of wilderness introduces questions about the balance between utility and appreciation, and between enjoyment and restraint. Wilderness is a nexus of competing and contested accounts of responsibility. In conversation with the work of Doug Peacock, Terry Tempest Williams, James Gustafson, and Martin Luther King Jr., Nathaniel Van Yperen offers an original argument for how wilderness can evoke a vision of a good life in which creaturely limits are accepted in gratitude, even in the face of ambiguity and mystery. Through the theme of gratitude, the book refocuses attention on the role of affection and testimony in ecological ethics and Christian ethics.

Wilderness is one of the most abiding creations in the history of religions. It has a long and seminal history and is of contemporary relevance in wildlife preservation and climate discourses. Yet it has not previously been subject to scrutiny or theorising from a cross-cultural study of religions perspective. What are the specific relations between the world’s religions and imagined and real wilderness areas? The wilderness is often understood as a domain void of humans, opposed to civilization, but the analyses in this book complicate and question the dualism of previous theoretical grids and offer new perspectives on the interesting multiplicity of the wilderness and religion nexus. This book thus addresses the need for cross-cultural anthropological and history of religions analyses by offering in-depth case studies of the use and functions of wilderness spaces in a diverse range of contexts including, but not limited to, ancient Greece, early Christian asceticism, Old Norse religion, the shamanism-Buddhism encounter in Mongolia, contemporary paganism, and wilderness spirituality in the US. It advances research on religious spatialities, cosmologies, and ideas of wild nature and brings new understanding of the role of religion in human interaction with ‘the world’.

At a time when ecological issues are prominent in religious and social discourse, this perfectly timed volume expresses a broad range of insights and opinions on ecology and the relationship between Christianity and the natural world. Topics are not limited to traditional environmental issues, but instead feature a variety of academic disciplines and experiences to dwell on "wildernesses" that are sometimes dangerous, sometimes sanctuaries, and often the source of graced encounter. (Publisher).

Wilderness in many parts of the globe is under considerable threat from human development. This has important ramifications not only for fauna and flora but also for human well-being. Wilderness in the Bible addresses this ecological crisis from a biblical and theological perspective. It first establishes the context of a biblical study of wilderness and then passes to an analysis of the attitudes towards in the canonical biblical record. This provides the biblical basis for the development of a theology of wilderness for the twenty-first century. The Australian wilderness is taken as an illuminating case study.

Like many unfulfilled by traditional faith expressions, Victoria Loorz went in search of a spirituality strong enough to reckon with the unraveling of her vocation, identity, and planet, and found herself in the wilderness. Loorz invites us to reimagine our relationship with and commitment to a suffering planet by loving it--and calling it church.