ABSTRACT
Religion matters. In our world today, this is difficult to deny. The majority of the world’s people still identify themselves as belonging to or shaped by a religious belief system; questions about the public role of religious morality in democratic societies remain hugely controversial; and threats of terrorism and violent extremism motivated by religious belief are increasingly becoming a part of contemporary life. It is also difficult to deny that the non-human natural world matters.
Modernity is in part defined by the biological assertion that human beings are a species like all others, emerging from and dependent on natural systems. Over the last 60 years, the Western industrialized peoples most shaped by modernity have also become increasingly aware that these natural systems can be endangered by our choices: that the air, the soil, the water, and the climate are changed – and degraded – by human beings. This book is about religion and the natural world, but more specifically it is
about the ways they matter to one another, about how the religious world influences and is influenced by ecological systems. The chapters that follow are meant to inspire questions about the relationship between religion and ecology and to help you think critically about the role of each in shaping one another and the world. Each one investigates the intersections of religion and ecology, introduces ongoing debates within the academic field that studies these intersections, and raises some of the important questions yet to be answered within the field.
