Religion and the New Ecology

“The book reflects the conviction that we must establish significant coherence between our historical, scientific, and religious understandings of nature if we are to effectively address current and emerging environmental problems . . . the editors effectively frame the overarching problems and the essays are serious, although still accessible to readers from various backgrounds.” —The Quarterly Review of Biology

“Christians in environmental studies can use this book as an additional source of opinions on moral and ethical questions.” —Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith

“… the authors firmly believe that religion has much to offer to modern environmentalism. They pragmatically argue that we need to engage with American Christians specifically, simply because of their prominence. More important, the authors genuinely believe that Christianity has the potential to contribute to a renewed environmental ethic; they unanimously dismiss Lynn White’s infamous thesis that Christianity is essentially the cause of ecological degradation.” — BioScience

“Contributors to this volume address the question of how the new paradigm of continual change in ecology ('flux in nature') fits into the broader history of ecological science and the cultural history of the West, and, in particular, how environmental ethics and eco-theology should respond.” —Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment

"Everything on Earth is becoming unbalanced—escalating populations and consumption, global warming, extinction, troubling ecosystems that by nature are fluxing, evolving, often disturbed, even chaotic. What can and ought we conserve, preserve, sustain on this planet in jeopardy? Here science and religion join in urgent dialogue, a seminal search for answers as we face an open future, with promise and peril." —Holmes Rolston, III, University Distinguished Professor and Professor of Philosophy, Colorado State University

"Ecology has experienced a major paradigm shift over the last half of the twentieth century. This shift requires major rethinking of the relation of religion and environmental ethics to ecology because our scientific understanding of the nature side of that relationship has changed. This book is the first, to my knowledge, that is meeting this challenge head on, and it is doing so in an exemplary way." —J. Baird Callicott, University of North Texas