While it is tempting to seek solutions to the environmental crisis through scholarship on religion and the environment, religious studies…
Nature and normativity: New inquiries into the natural world
This forum follows the format of two previous discussions featured on The Immanent Frame: “Science and the soul: New inquiries into Islamic ethics” (2018) and “Modernity’s resonances: New inquiries into the secular” (2019). Scholars will discuss three recent books that consider how nature and natural processes are understood to mediate normative principles and ethical guidelines. The three books included in this discussion are Black Lives and Sacred Humanity by Carol Wayne White (Fordham University Press, 2016), The Gospel of Climate Skepticism by Robin Globus Veldman (University of California Press, 2019), and Muslim Environmentalisms by Anna M. Gade (Columbia University Press, 2019). Respondents in this forum were asked to reflect on these books and the themes and topics emergent from them.
Begin by reading editorial board member Lisa Sideris’s introduction to the forum, which she cocurated with TIF editor Mona Oraby. Sideris provides an overview of the common themes, questions, narratives, and frames that emerge from the books and essays. Then, check back each week as a new book is featured with essays by the author and two other scholars. These essays will be followed with additional reflection essays from the book authors and a concluding essay.
Nature as protective strategy: The environment and a new normal
In the spirit of the critique of categories in the study of religion as protective strategies, I wonder what nature…
Which politics of nature? A response to Crockford
[F]rom the vantage point of religious naturalism, I consider the “nature” of nature discourse in Veldman’s framing of white evangelicals’…
The environmentalist’s dilemma
Many of us who set out to study the environmentalism of religious people in real, lived contexts have struggled with…
Scales of justice for environmental ethics: A reply to Hennessy and Hoesterey
Muslim Environmentalisms claims that the environment is an ethical idea. It is about environmental ethics; it is not a book…
Provincializing the environmental humanities: An Islamic view
Every now and then a book comes along, at times from an oblique vantage point or marginalized point of reference,…
Ethical response and the environmental humanities
Gade approaches the question of justice as a scholar of the history of religions and environmental studies. A study of…
Beyond belief? A reply to Berry and Crockford
One of the most difficult aspects of writing The Gospel of Climate Skepticism for me related to audience. The audience…
Orders of nature, norms of order
The sentiment that we are in a troubled, uncertain, and unusual period reverberates throughout media think pieces, anodyne corporate advertisements,…
Social climates beyond belief and doubt
Robin Globus Veldman’s The Gospel of Climate Skepticism is a timely intervention into longstanding debates about the relationship between religious…