Ecospirit

We hope and we doubt that the environmental crisis will remain at bay. 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,...
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We hope and we doubt that the environmental crisis will remain at bay. 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. In the face of deconstruction, the possibility of "econstruction" arises.

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.