Being Human

Anna L. Peterson is Associate Professor of Religion at the University of Florida and author of Martyrdom and the Politics of Religion: Progressive Catholicism in El Salvador's Civil War (1997) and co-editor of the forthcoming Christianity, Social and and Globalization in the Americas(2001), with Manuel Vasquez and Philip Williams.

"[Being Human] is one of the few books that begins to integrate theological narratives with scientific ones, looking for a compelling correlation between them where modern and religious sensibilities might both be affirmed." - Bron Taylor, author of Ecological Resistance Movements "Being Human succeeds at accounting for people's conception of humanness and humans' relationship with nature - no easy task, but one that is a crucial starting point for any discussion of environmental ethics." - Kay Read, author of Time and Sacrifice in the Aztec Cosmos "Being Human is a stellar work of integration.... [Peterson] draws together cultural constructionist, Asian, Native American, feminist and evolutionary thought to present a view of the human as both an integral part of nature and a creator of culture." - Rosemary Radford Ruether, author of Gain and God"

• Acknowledgements 1. Introduction 2. Not of the World: Human Exceptionalism in Western Tradition 3. The Social Construction of Nature and Human Nature 4. The Relational Self: Asian Views of Nature and Human Nature 5. Person and Nature in Native American Worldviews 6. Relationships, Stories, and Feminist Ethics 7. Evolution, Ecology, and Ethics 8. In and Of the World: Toward a Chastened Constructionist Anthropology 9. Different Natures Bibliography