Religious and Cultural Ecologies

Catalog description

This course explores the rich diversity of religious and cultural ecologies found throughout much of the world. Religious and cultural ecologies refer to the scientific and scholarly studies of the vast, complex, diverse, and dynamic arena at the interfaces of religions and cultures on the one hand, and environments, ecologies and environmentalism on the other. The course asks the question of what roles, if any, the religious traditions of different cultures the world over might play in addressing the contemporary ecological crisis. This question is addressed from a combined religous studies and anthropological approach focusing on the intersections of religion, culture, and ecology from a textual, contexual, and cross-cultural or comparative framework.