Course info

This course studies global religious responses and movements to various ecological crises in different traditions, particularly in Indigenous Religions, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. We will explore and compare global ecological theologies and imaginaries in these religious traditions, and, we will centralize how women in some of these religious traditions address the intersections of gender, race, class, and eco-justice. Throughout the course, we will attend to the theological anthropologies – or religious understandings of the human person – which inform both distorted relationships between human and more-than-human earthly life (e.g., seeking transcendence from the body and the world) and religious ecological activism to reconfigure these relationships for gender and eco-justice, for the common and cosmic good.

In sum, Green Religion focuses on how religious beliefs and practices contribute to an ecological imaginary with ethical, social, and political implications for the communities that both humans and more-than-humans encompass. This course examines different contemporary world religious cultures of ecological justice, by comparing and contrasting these cultures with attention in some traditions to how women critically revision and reconstruct these traditions and practices (especially but not only about the human person) for social as well as ecological solidarity movements.