Arts, Religion, and the Environment: Exploring Nature’s Texture

Humans have been described as “meaning-making animals.” At the threshold of the Anthropocene, how might humans artistically envision their place in the world? Do humans possess cultural tools, which will allow us to imagine new possibilities and relationships with the natural environment at a time when our material surroundings are under siege?
Exploring Nature’s Texture looks at the imaginative possibilities of using the visual arts to address the breakdown of the human relationship with the environment. Bringing together contributions from artists, theologians, anthropologists and philosophers, it investigates the arts as a bridge between culture and nature, as well as between the human and more-than-human world.

Contributors: Whitney A. Bauman, Sigurd Bergmann, Forrest Clingerman, Timothy M. Collins, J. Sage Elwell, Reiko Goto, Arto Haapala, Tim Ingold, Karolina Sobecka, George Steinmann

Sigurd Bergmann, PhD (Lund, 1995), is Professor in Religious Studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. His publications include God in Context (Ashgate 2003), Creation Set Free (Eerdmans 2005), In the Beginning is the Icon (Equinox, 2009), and Religion, Space and the Environment (Transaction, 2014/2016).

Forrest Clingerman, Ph.D. (Iowa, 2005) is Associate Professor at Ohio Northern University (USA). He researches environmental theology and philosophy, and is co-editor of Theological and Ethical Perspectives on Climate Engineering (Lexington, 2016) and Interpreting Nature: The Emerging Field of Environmental Hermeneutics (Fordham University Press, 2014).