Troubling Climate and Religion: The Climate Crisis beyond Disenchantment

Against the backdrop of mounting ecological destruction, literature beyond the scope of religious studies has taken on sensibilities and metaphysical concerns traditionally associated with religious writing and critique. Some authors view religious ideas as being at the root of dangerous environmental attitudes, while others turn to theological idioms as potential avenues of redress. Although modernist and Western environmental attitudes have often been glossed as “disenchanted” by writers on both sides of this debate, this article suggests that the term obscures a much more fraught set of processes that crosscut discursive and material boundaries. It contends that to study climate and religion in the same frame today should be to consider how religious ideas were inscribed into landscapes, and in turn how these remade ecologies came to influence religious ideas and practices.

Duke Scholars

Author Raffaella Taylor-Seymour Religious Studies