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It turns out that all the texts I might have assigned for this new course are available as e-books from the library (I ordered several of them), so students won't have to purchase any. Ecological! That also gives me flexibility on what parts of each to assign... Early on we'll be reading the account of the emergence of this field of research by the people most responsible for it, John Grim and Mary Evelyn Tucker. Their valedictory Ecology and Religion (3rd ed., Island Press, 2014) offers a handy roster of ten words, all starting with r, to name the "values" they find in common among world religious traditions regarding nature (8)
reverence
respect
reciprocity
restraint
redistribution
responsibility
restoration
and the emphases of the emergent field of religion and ecology (86)
retrieval
reevaluation
reconstruction
That's a lot of r's (actually re's)! I'll help myself to them, but Grim and Tucker's narrative, rooted in the world religions (and the "indigenous") and their dialogue, is only one of three I'm going to try braiding. The second is the emerging "spiritual ecology' movement, which seeks to articulate a single ecological ethic and spirituality for our shared planet from insights of religious and nonreligious and scientific leaders. The third thread is the more ambivalent academic field of religion and ecology, which is suspicious of alleged commonalities across traditions and dares to wonder if religion and spirituality are categories worth working with at all; Anthropocene worries will come in here, too.
The "braiding" comes loosely from one of my favorite books of recent years, Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Milkweed, 2016), ix:
The "braiding" comes loosely from one of my favorite books of recent years, Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Milkweed, 2016), ix:
