Religion, Narrative, and the Environmental Humanities provides a fresh look at rhetoric, religion, and environmental humanities through narratives of evangelical culture, analyses of evangelical writing, and their connection to environmental topics. This volume aims to present a cultural understanding between evangelical and non-evangelical communities, exploring how environmental priorities and differences fit within the thinking and felt experiences of American evangelicalism. Offering a variety of theological topics, chapters include discussion of key themes such as eschatology, scriptural authority, or stewardship, and their relationship to evangelical thinking and conceptualization within climate change rhetoric. To help readers better access evangelicalism and translate these ideas, each chapter utilizes individual narratives located within evangelicalism to set an affective or experiential base for readers. In addition, this volume includes textual analysis of key documents within each section to further explore the environmental issues, values, and elements within the subculture of American evangelicalism. This volume will be essential for all scholars interested in bridging the gap of cultural translation and exploring the deep rhetorical roots of evangelical attitudes toward environmental issues.

This timely collection of essays by leading international scholars across religious studies and the environmental humanities advances a lively discussion on materialism in its many forms. While there is little agreement on what ‘materialism’ means, it is evident that there is a resurgence in thinking about matter in more animated and active ways. The volume explores how debates concerning the new materialisms impinge on religious traditions and the extent to which religions, with their material culture and beliefs in the Divine within the material, can make a creative contribution to debates about ecological materialisms. Spanning a broad range of themes, including politics, architecture, hermeneutics, literature and religion, the book brings together a series of discussions on materialism in the context of diverse methodologies and approaches. The volume investigates a range of issues including space and place, hierarchy and relationality, the relationship between nature and society, human and other agencies, and worldviews and cultural values. Drawing on literary and critical theory, and queer, philosophical, theological and social theoretical approaches, this ground-breaking book will make an important contribution to the environmental humanities. It will be a key read for postgraduate students, researchers and scholars in religious studies, cultural anthropology, literary studies, philosophy and environmental studies.

What can a study of antiquity contribute to the interdisciplinary paradigm of the environmental humanities? And how does this recent paradigm influence the way we perceive human-'nature' interactions in pre-modernity? By asking these and a number of related questions, this Element aims to show why the ancient tradition still matters in the Anthropocene. Offering new perspectives to think about what directions the ecological turn could take in classical studies, it revisits old material, including ancient Greek religion and mythology, with central concepts of contemporary environmental theory. It also critically engages with forms of classical reception in current debates, arguing that ancient ecological knowledge is a powerful resource for creating alternative world views.

The moral values and interpretive systems of religions are crucially involved in how people imagine the challenges of sustainability and how societies mobilize to enhance ecosystem resilience and human well-being. The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Ecology provides the most comprehensive and authoritative overview of the field. It encourages both appreciative and critical angles regarding religious traditions, communities, attitude, and practices. It presents contrasting ways of thinking about "religion" and about "ecology" and about ways of connecting the two terms. Written by a team of leading international experts, the Handbook discusses dynamics of change within religious traditions as well as their roles in responding to global challenges such as climate change, water, conservation, food and population. It explores the interpretations of indigenous traditions regarding modern environmental problems drawing on such concepts as lifeway and indigenous knowledge. This volume uniquely intersects the field of religion and ecology with new directions within the humanities and the sciences. This interdisciplinary volume is an essential reference for scholars and students across the social sciences and humanities and for all those looking to understand the significance of religion in environmental studies and policy.

Weather, Religion and Climate Change is the first in-depth exploration of the fascinating way in which the weather impacts on the fields of religion, art, culture, history, science, and architecture. In critical dialogue with meteorology and climate science, this book takes the reader beyond the limits of contemporary thinking about the Anthropocene and explores whether a deeper awareness of weather might impact on the relationship between nature and self. Drawing on a wide range of examples, including paintings by J.M.W. Turner, medieval sacred architecture, and Aristotle’s classical Meteorologica, Bergmann examines a geographically and historically wide range of cultural practices, religious practices, and worldviews in which weather appears as a central, sacred force of life. He also examines the history of scientific meteorology and its ambivalent commodification today, as well as medieval "weather witchery" and biblical perceptions of weather as a kind of "barometer" of God’s love. Overall, this volume explores the notion that a new awareness of weather and its atmospheres can serve as a deep cultural and spiritual driving force that can overcome the limits of the Anthropocene and open a new path to the "Ecocene", the age of nature. Drawing on methodologies from religious studies, cultural studies, art history and architecture, philosophy, environmental ethics and aesthetics, history, and theology, this book will be of great interest to all those concerned with studying the environment from a transdisciplinary perspective on weather and wisdom.

Avatar and Nature Spirituality explores the cultural and religious significance of James Cameron’s film Avatar (2010), one of the most commercially successful motion pictures of all time. Its success was due in no small measure to the beauty of the Pandora landscape and the dramatic, heart-wrenching plight of its nature-venerating inhabitants. To some audience members, the film was inspirational, leading them to express affinity with the film’s message of ecological interdependence and animistic spirituality. Some were moved to support the efforts of indigenous peoples, who were metaphorically and sympathetically depicted in the film, to protect their cultures and environments. To others, the film was politically, ethically, or spiritually dangerous. Indeed, the global reception to the film was intense, contested, and often confusing. To illuminate the film and its reception, this book draws on an interdisciplinary team of scholars, experts in indigenous traditions, religious studies, anthropology, literature and film, and post-colonial studies. Readers will learn about the cultural and religious trends that gave rise to the film and the reasons these trends are feared, resisted, and criticized, enabling them to wrestle with their own views, not only about the film but about the controversy surrounding it. Like the film itself, Avatar and Nature Spirituality provides an opportunity for considering afresh the ongoing struggle to determine how we should live on our home planet, and what sorts of political, economic, and spiritual values and practices would best guide us.

Many ways of thinking about and living with ‘the environment’ have their roots in the Bible and the Christian cultural tradition. Environmental Humanities and Theologies shows that some of these ways are problematic. It also provides alternative ways that value both materiality and spirituality. Beginning with an environmentally friendly reading of the biblical story of creation, Environmental Humanities and Theologies goes on to discuss in succeeding chapters the environmental theology of wetlands, dragons and watery monsters (including crocodiles and alligators) in the Bible and literature. It then gives a critical reading of the environmental theology of the biblical book of Psalms. Theological concepts are found in the works of English writers of detective and devotional stories and novels, American nature writers and European Jewish writers (as succeeding chapters show). Environmental Humanities and Theologies concludes with an appreciation for Australian Aboriginal spirituality in the swamp serpent. It argues for the sacrality of marsh monsters and swamp serpents as figures of reverence and respect for living bio- and psycho-symbiotic livelihoods in bioregions of the living earth in the Symbiocene. This is the hoped-for age superseding the Anthropocene. Environmental Humanities and Theologies is aimed at those who have little or no knowledge of how theology underlies much thinking and writing about ‘the environment’ and who are looking for ways of thinking about, being and living with the earth that respect and value both spirituality and materiality. It is a new text nurturing sacrality for the Symbiocene.