FIU Department of Religious Studies

Inherited Land: The Changing Methodological Grounds of Religion and Ecology

Prospectus for an Edited Volume

(CLICK HERE TO VIEW COLLOQUIUM SCHEDULE)

“Religion and ecology” has arrived. It has become an established academic field with classic texts, graduate programs, regular meetings at academic conferences, and growing interest from other academics and the mass media. Theologians, ethicists, sociologists, and other scholars are engaged in a broad dialogue about the ways religious studies can help to understand and address environmental problems, including the sorts of methodological, terminological, and substantive debates that characterize any academic discourse.

This book aims to recognize the field that has taken shape, reflect on the ways it is changing, and to anticipate its development in the future. The essays will offer analyses and reflections from emerging scholars of religion and ecology, each addressing her or his own specialty in light of these two questions: What have we inherited from the work that has come before us, and what questions must the next generation of scholarship address? Our aim in this volume is not to offer conclusive answers to these questions, but rather to outline some of the major issues we face in the academy and to offer perspectives for continued dialogue.

The premise of Inherited Land is that the context in which scholars of religion relate to environmental issues is changing. The work of religion and ecology over the past three decades has established that there is a connection between faith traditions and environmental issues and that the public is interested in our work. However, this growing plurality of voices has been accompanied by controversies over precisely how religious faiths and the environment are connected, and these controversies have been resolved in a variety of sometimes contradictory ways. Over thirty years of conversation, scholars in this field have implicitly identified a canon of central texts, ideas, and figures in the field, creating a foundation for teaching and scholarship today. But emerging scholars in the field have significant work to do to evaluate the canon in light of our new situation and to respond to contemporary debates in the academy, faith traditions, and the environmental movement.

The essays of this book will offer critical reflections on the study of religion and ecology in light of these changing contexts. In Part I, essays will reflect most explicitly on what we have inherited, offering a history of our field, an interrogation of what traditions are represented in it, comparative analyses of the two most prominent approaches among current scholars, and reflections on the roles of activism and science in our work.

The remainder of the essays will directly consider the methodological work that lies ahead in religion and ecology as an academic pursuit. Part II is guided by the methods of religious studies and theology and investigates what is included and implied by use of the term “religion.” Chapters in this section develop new questions for our field based on new understandings of spirituality, lived religions, religious practices, religious narratives, religious places, and religious movements. Part III then moves to investigate the other academic pursuits and disciplines in dialogue with religion and ecology, emphasizing the wide variety of ways to know and understand environmental issues and the importance of careful analysis of our field’s place in the broad academy. Chapters attend to geography, critical and postmodern philosophy, animal studies, gender and sexuality studies, economics, and sociology.

The study of religion and ecology is increasingly vital and relevant. This very vitality, however, has opened up new avenues for discourse and changed the parameters of the discipline. This book will help to shape the future of the field of religion and ecology as it fleshes out some of the shifting contours of these “changes in the land” with an array of thoughtful essays from emerging scholars. As the study of religion and ecology is inherently interdisciplinary, Inherited Land will be of interest to scholars from a variety of disciplines, including especially religion, environmental studies, and cultural studies. Because it reviews an important academic field that is frequently taught at many levels of higher education, the book will be written at a level appropriate for advanced undergraduate courses and graduate-level seminars.

Inherited Land:

Tentative Colloquium Schedule

Florida International University

University Park Campus

Graham Center (GC 243)

February 26 - March 1, 2009