Spirit and Nature : Why the Environment Is a Religious Issue - an Interfaith Dialogue

As featured in Bill Moyers's PBS special "Spirit and Nature", leaders from major traditions around the world speak out in this volume about what spiritual resources we may turn to in our age of unprecedented danger to the planet.

This fine volume (as well as a 1991 PBS documentary by Bill Moyers) grew out of a convocation at Middlebury College that assessed the spiritual dimensions of the world's ongoing environmental crisis. Rockefeller ( John Dewey: Religious Faith and Democratic Humanism ) and Elder (co-editor of The Norton Book of Nature Writing ) assembled an excellent panel of theologians and environmentalists, representing Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Islamic, Native American and other traditions. Ismar Schorsch, chancellor of New York's Jewish Theological Seminary, reflects upon whether Judaism's legal regulation of humankind's relationship with nature might promote self-restraint and help us adapt to a world of diminished resources. Methodist theologian Sallie McFague discusses how theologians might help us reimagine ourselves by reconsidering the central images from metaphors of dominion to those of interrelatedness. The Dalai Lama suggests that we see environmentalism as a "practical ethic,"117 simply "taking care of our own house." These uniformly strong contributions offer a good start toward asking whether religion might, at once, marshal its resources and find a renewed sense of purpose in helping save the planet.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Scheduled for publication on World Environment Day, this collection of essays by Native American, Jewish, Christian, Islamic, Buddhist, and other leaders preserves a record of a symposium at Middlebury College in 1990. An introduction situates the symposium at the end of "several decades of steadily increasing concern about our global environmental crisis." The essays are insightful, and in the best traditions of interfaith dialog, they seek to discover what each tradition can contribute to an understanding of this crisis (seen in part as a crisis of moral values and of religious faith), and how to use spiritual resources to respond to the crisis. A Bill Moyers special, Spirit and Nature (1991), also featured these religious leaders, which should contribute to the popular appeal of this book. Highly recommended for all libraries.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.