Religious Ethics and Environmental Challenges – serie

The climate is changing as an unintended consequence of human industrialization and consumerism. Recently some scientists and engineers have suggested climate engineering—technological solutions that would intentionally change the climate to make it more hospitable. This approach focuses on large-scale technologies to alleviate the worst effects of anthropogenic climate change. This book considers the moral, philosophical, and religious questions raised by such proposals, bringing Christian theology and ethics into the conversation about climate engineering for the first time. The contributors have different views on whether climate engineering is morally acceptable and on what kinds of climate engineering are most promising and most dangerous, but all agree that religion has a vital role to play in the analysis and decisions called for on this vital issue.Calming the Storm presents diverse perspectives on some of the most vital questions raised by climate engineering: Who has the right to make decisions about such global technological efforts? What have we learned from the decisions that caused the climate to change that might shed light on efforts to reverse that change? What frameworks and metaphors are helpful in thinking about climate engineering, and which are counterproductive? What religious beliefs, practices, and rituals can help people to imagine and evaluate the prospect of engineering the climate?

Can Christian sin-talk be retrieved within the public sphere? In this contribution to ecotheology, Ernst M. Conradie argues that, amid ecological destruction, discourse on sin can contribute to a multidisciplinary depth diagnosis of what has gone wrong in the world. He confronts some major obstacles related to the plausibility of sin-talk in conversation with evolutionary biology, the cognitive sciences, and animal ethology. He defends an Augustinian insistence that social evil, rather than natural evil, is our primary predicament. If the root cause of social evil is sin, then a Christian confession of sin may yet yield good news for the whole earth.

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.

Humanity operates like a force of nature capable of affecting the destiny of the Earth System. This epochal shift profoundly alters the relationship between humankind and the Earth, presenting the conscious, thinking human animal with an unprecedented dilemma: As human power has grown over the Earth, so has the power of nature to extinguish human life. The emergence of the Anthropocene has settled any question of the place of human beings in the world: we stand inescapably at its center. The outstanding question—which forms the impetus and focus for this book—remains: What kind of human being stands at the center of the world? And what is the nature of that world? Unlike the scientific fact of human-centeredness, this is a moral question, a question that brings theology within the scope of reflection on the critical failures of human irresponsibility. Much of Christian theology has so far flunked the test of engaging the reality of the Anthropocene. The authors of these original essays begin with the premise that it is time to push harder at the questions the Anthropocene poses for people of faith.

Faiths in Green addresses the complex and fraught relationship between religious identity and environmental concern in the United States, particularly how that relationship has changed over time. Examining the effects of religious upbringing, belonging, and disaffiliation on environmental concern across multiple religious groups over several decades, the author shows where, when, how, and why religious groups and their memberships have responded constructively to environmental change over time. The author also visits the effects of gender, social class, race, and politics on both religion and environmental concern in the U.S. Faiths in Green offers an in-depth and accessible guide to understanding the at-times incongruous relationship between religious beliefs and motivations, as well as ways to follow cultural shifts that both drive and are driven by religious persons and institutions. In examining how religious and cultural factors are linked to environmental concern over time, Faiths in Green demonstrates the importance of morality and worldviews in confronting global hazards of unprecedented scale.