Ecospirit: Religions and Philosophies for the Earth

Front Cover
Laurel Kearns, Catherine Keller
Fordham University Press, 2007 - Religion - 644 pages
We hope-- even as we often doubt-- that the environmental crisis can be controlled. Public awareness of our species' self-destructive relation to its own materiality is growing. But so is the destruction. The needed practical interventions seem to require a collective shift of such magnitude as to take on spiritual or religious intensity. Traditions of ecological theology and eco-religious praxis have been preparing the way for several decades, yet they have remained marginal to society, academy, and church. With a fresh, transdisciplinary approach, Ecospirit probes the possibility of a green shift radical enough to permeate the ancient roots of our sensibility and the social sources of our practice. Its authors undertake an elemental deconstruction of our theological habits of supernaturalism, our under-thought praxis, as well as our philosophical models of nature. But in this study deconstruction begins to turn upon itself, perplexed by its own earth-blind anthropocentrisms. The possibility of "econstruction" arises.The essays of Ecospirit transmute a paralyzing sense of emergency into the emergence of a moving language of the earth. Grounded in the complex ecosocial contexts in which all creatures become, a discourse for a genesis collective begins to take form. The essays pursue a thought-experiment in multi-leveled, multi-religious, multi-contextual ecospirituality. They embrace introductory exercises in ecotheology, conceptually rigorous engagements with the theological tradition and its philosophical underpinnings, and explorations of the ways that religious praxis can both harm and heal. The book ranges across theology, religious studies, philosophy, literary criticism, ethics, sociology, and cultural studies. --Publisher description.

About the author (2007)

LAUREL KEARNS is Associate Professor of Sociology of Religion and Environmental Studies in the Theological School and Graduate Division of Religion of Drew University. She is the co-editor of Ecospirit: Religions and Philosophies for the Earth (Fordham). Catherine Keller is George T. Cobb Professor of Constructive Theology in The Graduate Division of Religion, Drew University. She works amidst the tangles of ecosocial, pluralist, feminist philosophy of religion and theology. Her books include Face of the Deep: a Theology of Becoming; On the Mystery; Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement; Political Theology of the Earth: Our Planetary Emergency and the Struggle for a New Public. She has co-edited several volumes of the Drew Transdisciplinary Theological Colloquium, most recently Political Theology on Edge: Ruptures of Justice and Belief in the Anthropocene. Her latest monograph is Facing Apocalypse: Climate, Democracy and Other Last Chances.

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