Ecospirit Religions and Philosophies for the Earth

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--all serving to explore and expand our sense of how to proceed in the face of an ecological crisis that demands new thinking and acting. The essays keep faith with activist practice as well as with theoretical aporia. In the midst of indubitable planetary crisis, they aim to activate imagination, humor, ritual, and hope.

LAUREL KEARNS is Associate Professor of Sociology of Religion and Environmental Studies in the Theological School and Graduate Division of Religion of Drew University.

CATHERINE KELLER is Professor of Constructive Theology in the Theological School and Graduate Division of Religion at Drew University. She co-edited with Virginia Burrus the first volume of the Transdisciplinary Theological Colloquia, Toward a Theology of Eros: Transfiguring Passion at the Limits of Discipline (Fordham), and co-edited with Laurel Kearns its second volume, Ecospirit: Philosophies and Religions for the Earth (Fordham). Previous books include Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming and On the Mystery: Discerning Divinity in Process.