Download or read book Theology Creation and Environmental Ethics written by Whitney Bauman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-04-30 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the John Templeton Award for Theological Promise, 2009 This book argues that the Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilo sets up a support system for a "logic of domination" over others. It follows a genealogical method in examining how the concept of creation out of nothing materializes in the world throughout different periods in the history of the Christian West.
Download or read book Creation Environment and Ethics written by Rebekah Humphreys and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2010-09-13 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Creation, Environment and Ethics aims to contribute to a critical understanding of ethics, evolution and creation, and to provide a pluralistic response to some of the most pressing issues facing the global environment today. Following the example of Professor Robin Attfield, this volume aims to reflect the diverse responses with which theological, ethical and evolutionary discourses have contributed to the broad scope of environmental philosophy and also to ongoing debates about creation and evolution. Critiques of the work of Attfield are provided by prominent philosophers, and Attfield provides a clear and thorough response to each of these critiques in turn. The broad ranging nature of this book will appeal to environmentalists, ethicists, theologians and students alike. Some of the contributions also offer more pragmatic approaches to environmental issues such as climate change, development and sustainability, which will be of interest to a general as well as to an academic readership.
Download or read book From Nature to Creation The Church and Postmodern Culture written by Norman Wirzba and published by Baker Academic. This book was released on 2015-09-23 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How does Christianity change the way we view the natural world? In this addition to a critically acclaimed series, renowned theologian Norman Wirzba engages philosophers, environmentalists, and cultural critics to show how the modern concept of nature has been deeply problematic. He explains that understanding the world as creation rather than as nature or the environment makes possible an imagination shaped by practices of responsibility and gratitude, which can help bring healing to our lands and communities. By learning to give thanks for creation as God's gift of life, Christians bear witness to the divine love that is reconciling all things to God. Named a "Best Theology Book of 2015," Englewood Review of Books "Best Example of Theology in Conversation with Urgent Contemporary Concerns" for 2015, Hearts & Minds Bookstore
Download or read book Ecologies of Grace written by Willis Jenkins and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-02-12 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christianity struggles to show how living on earth matters for living with God. While people of faith increasingly seek practical ways to respond to the environmental crisis, theology has had difficulty contextualizing the crisis and interpreting the responses. In Ecologies of Grace, Willis Jenkins presents a field-shaping introduction to Christian environmental ethics that offers resources for renewing theology. Observing how religious environmental practices often draw on concepts of grace, Jenkins maps the way Christian environmental strategies draw from traditions of salvation as they engage the problems of environmental ethics. He then uses this new map to explore afresh the ecological dimensions of Christian theology. Jenkins first shows how Christian ethics uniquely frames environmental issues, and then how those approaches both challenge and reinhabit theological traditions. He identifies three major strategies for making environmental problems intelligible to Christian moral experience. Each one draws on a distinct pattern of grace as it adapts a secular approach to environmental ethics. The strategies of ecojustice, stewardship, and ecological spirituality make environments matter for Christian experience by drawing on patterns of sanctification, redemption, and deification. He then confronts the problems of each of these strategies through critical reappraisals of Thomas Aquinas, Karl Barth, and Sergei Bulgakov. Each represents a soteriological tradition which Jenkins explores as an ecology of grace, letting environmental questions guide investigation into how nature becomes significant for Christian experience. By being particularly sensitive to the ways in which environmental problems are made intelligible to Christian moral experience, Jenkins guides his readers toward a fuller understanding of Christianity and ecology. He not only makes sense of the variety of Christian environmental ethics, but by showing how environmental issues come to the heart of Christian experience, prepares fertile ground for theological renewal.
Download or read book Creation Ethics written by David DeGrazia and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ethics of creating -- or declining to create -- human beings has been addressed in several contexts: debates over abortion and embryo research; literature on "self-creation"; and discussions of procreative rights and responsibilities, genetic engineering, and future generations. Here, for the first time, is a sustained, scholarly analysis of all of these issues -- a discussion combining breadth of topics with philosophical depth, imagination with current scientific understanding, argumentative rigor with accessibility. The overarching aim of Creation Ethics is to illuminate a broad array of issues connected with reproduction and genetics, through the lens of moral philosophy. With novel frameworks for understanding prenatal moral status and human identity, and exceptional fairness to those holding different views, David DeGrazia sheds new light on the ethics of abortion and embryo research, genetic enhancement and prenatal genetic interventions, procreation and parenting, and decisions that affect the quality of life of future generations. Along the way, he helpfully introduces personal identity theory and value theory as well as such complex topics as moral status, wrongful life, and the "nonidentity problem." The results include a subjective account of human well-being, a standard for responsible procreation and parenting, and a theoretical bridge between consequentialist and nonconsequentialist ethical theories. The upshot is a synoptic, mostly liberal vision of the ethics of creating human beings.
Download or read book Aesth ethics in Environmental Change written by Sigurd Bergmann and published by LIT Verlag Münster. This book was released on 2013 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can aesthetics and ethics be integrated for the good of habitats, places, and spaces? How can the arts widen our perception of nature and deepen environmental ethics? Should the political meaning of a landscape be defined solely in terms of its economic and ecological values? Questions like these are explored from the angles of arts, environmental ethics, ecology, religious studies, theology, art history, and philosophy. The book prompts discussion about the aesthetic and spiritual dimension in the environmental humanities, and it offers transdisciplinary insights into the challenge of sustainability and ongoing changes in society and the environment. (Series: Studies in Religion and the Environment / Studien zur Religion und Umwelt - Vol. 7)
Download or read book The Ethics of Knowledge Creation written by Lisette Josephides and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2017-06-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anthropology lies at the heart of the human sciences, tackling questions having to do with the foundations, ethics, and deployment of the knowledge crucial to human lives. The Ethics of Knowledge Creation focuses on how knowledge is relationally created, how local knowledge can be transmuted into ‘universal knowledge’, and how the transaction and consumption of knowledge also monitors its subsequent production. This volume examines the ethical implications of various kinds of relations that are created in the process of ‘transacting knowledge’ and investigates how these transactions are also situated according to broader contradictions or synergies between ethical, epistemological, and political concerns.
Download or read book Environmental Ethics Ecological Theology and Natural Selection written by Lisa H. Sideris and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lisa Sideris proposes a new way of thinking about the natural world, an environmental ethic that incorporates the ideas of natural selection and values the processes rather than the products of nature. Such an approach encourages us to take a minimally interventionist approach to nature. Only when the competitive realities of evolution are faced squarely, Sideris argues, can we generate practical environmental principles to deal with such issues as species extinction and the relationship between suffering and sentience.
Download or read book Thinking Like a Mall written by Steven Vogel and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2015-05 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A provocative argument that environmental thinking would be better off if it dropped the concept of “nature” altogether and spoke instead of the built environment. Environmentalism, in theory and practice, is concerned with protecting nature. But if we have now reached “the end of nature,” as Bill McKibben and other environmental thinkers have declared, what is there left to protect? In Thinking like a Mall, Steven Vogel argues that environmental thinking would be better off if it dropped the concept of “nature” altogether and spoke instead of the “environment”—that is, the world that actually surrounds us, which is always a built world, the only one that we inhabit. We need to think not so much like a mountain (as Aldo Leopold urged) as like a mall. Shopping malls, too, are part of the environment and deserve as much serious consideration from environmental thinkers as do mountains. Vogel argues provocatively that environmental philosophy, in its ethics, should no longer draw a distinction between the natural and the artificial and, in its politics, should abandon the idea that something beyond human practices (such as “nature”) can serve as a standard determining what those practices ought to be. The appeal to nature distinct from the built environment, he contends, may be not merely unhelpful to environmental thinking but in itself harmful to that thinking. The question for environmental philosophy is not “how can we save nature?” but rather “what environment should we inhabit, and what practices should we engage in to help build it?”
Download or read book Laudato Si written by Pope Francis and published by Our Sunday Visitor. This book was released on 2015-07-18 with total page 119 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “In the heart of this world, the Lord of life, who loves us so much, is always present. He does not abandon us, he does not leave us alone, for he has united himself definitively to our earth, and his love constantly impels us to find new ways forward. Praise be to him!” – Pope Francis, Laudato Si’ In his second encyclical, Laudato Si’: On the Care of Our Common Home, Pope Francis draws all Christians into a dialogue with every person on the planet about our common home. We as human beings are united by the concern for our planet, and every living thing that dwells on it, especially the poorest and most vulnerable. Pope Francis’ letter joins the body of the Church’s social and moral teaching, draws on the best scientific research, providing the foundation for “the ethical and spiritual itinerary that follows.” Laudato Si’ outlines: The current state of our “common home” The Gospel message as seen through creation The human causes of the ecological crisis Ecology and the common good Pope Francis’ call to action for each of us Our Sunday Visitor has included discussion questions, making it perfect for individual or group study, leading all Catholics and Christians into a deeper understanding of the importance of this teaching.
Download or read book Foundations of Environmental Ethics written by Eugene C. Hargrove and published by . This book was released on 1989 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, the author examines the history of ideas that has produced the conflict between Western environmentalism and other Western traditions.
Download or read book Caring for Creation written by Paul Douglas and published by Baker Books. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Faith-Based Solutions to Caring for the Earth Climate change is a confusing and polarizing issue. It may also prove to be the most daunting challenge of this century because children, the elderly, and the poor will be the first to feel its effects. The issue is all over the news, but what is seldom heard is a conservative, evangelical perspective. Connecting the dots between science and faith, this book explores the climate debate and how Christians can take the lead in caring for God's creation. The authors answer top questions such as "What's really happening?" and "Who can we trust?" and discuss stewarding the earth in light of evangelical values. "Acting on climate change is not about political agendas," they say. "It's about our kids. It's about being a disciple of Jesus Christ." Capping off this empowering book are practical, simple ideas for improving our environment and helping our families and those around us.
Download or read book The Environment and Christian Ethics written by Michael S. Northcott and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1996-09-28 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new approach to environmental ethics from within the Christian tradition.
Download or read book Bioregionalism and Global Ethics written by Richard Evanoff and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-09-13 with total page 631 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While a number of schools of environmental thought — including social ecology, ecofeminism, ecological Marxism, ecoanarchism, and bioregionalism — have attempted to link social issues to a concern for the environment, environmental ethics as an academic discipline has tended to focus more narrowly on ethics related either to changes in personal values or behavior, or to the various ways in which nature might be valued. What is lacking is a framework in which individual, social, and environmental concerns can be looked at not in isolation from each other, but rather in terms of their interrelationships. In this book, Evanoff aims to develop just such a philosophical framework — one in which ethical questions related to interactions between self, society, and nature can be discussed across disciplines and from a variety of different perspectives. The central problem his study investigates is the extent to which a dichotomized view of the relationship between nature and culture, perpetuated in ongoing debates over anthropocentric vs. ecocentric approaches to environmental ethics, might be overcome through the adoption of a transactional perspective, which offers a more dynamic and coevolutionary understanding of how humans interact with their natural environments. Unlike anthropocentric approaches to environmental ethics, which often privilege human concerns over ecological preservation, and some ecocentric approaches, which place more emphasis on preserving natural environments than on meeting human needs, a transactional approach attempts to create more symbiotic and less conflictual modes of interaction between human cultures and natural environments, which allow for the flourishing of both.
Download or read book Restoring the Ethics of Creation written by Andrew Sibley and published by Anno Mudi Books. This book was released on 2006-01 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Andrew Sibley argues that as a result of the rise of the Darwinian faith system and belief in the certainty of technological progress and unrestrained capitalism, we have lost a proper respect for nature and humanity. Ethical standards are now based on subjective criteria where each person is able to decide his or her own conduct, often living for self in a grand struggle for survival. No more is seen the providential God who offers blessing and grace to mankind, nor the divine Sovereign who requires people to live in partnership with his will and purpose. However, the Christian tradition known as Natural Theology has seen in nature the appearance of design, but more than that, it has pointed to the power, wisdom and goodness of the Designer and goes on to inform our conduct as Paul noted in Romans 1:20. This twin book approach enriches our lives, with the book of Scripture in the one hand, and the book of nature in the other, giving mankind rights, duties and a purpose in caring for one another and for creation. If as Christians we are really concerned with ethical standards, then we must restore and develop a proper understanding of the Natural Theology tradition, both in terms of the appearance of design seen in nature, and also in terms of our response to the Creator. Andrew Sibley, (BSc, MSc EDM (Open), FRMetS) has worked as a weather forecaster for a number of years, including presentation of forecasts on BBC local radio. He completed an MSc in Environmental Decision Making in 2003 with the Open University, and as a Christian he has developed a keen interest in environmental and social ethics. He is also a Council Member of the Creation Science Movement based in Portsmouth, which was founded in 1932 to challenge the ethical, theological and scientific implications that belief in evolution presents to society.
Download or read book Theological Foundations for Environmental Ethics written by James Schaefer and published by Georgetown University Press. This book was released on 2009-05-07 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Earth is imperiled. Human activities are adversely affecting the land, water, air, and myriad forms of biological life that comprise the ecosystems of our planet. Indicators of global warming and holes in the ozone layer inhibit functions vital to the biosphere. Environmental damage to the planet becomes damaging to human health and well-being now and into the future—and too often that damage affects those who are least able to protect themselves. Can religion make a positive contribution to preventing further destruction of biological diversity and ecosystems and threats to our earth? Jame Schaefer thinks that it can, and she examines the thought of Christian Church fathers and medieval theologians to reveal and retrieve insights that may speak to our current plight. By reconstructing the teachings of Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and other classic thinkers to reflect our current scientific understanding of the world, Schaefer shows how to "green" the Catholic faith: to value the goodness of creation, to appreciate the beauty of creation, to respect creation's praise for God, to acknowledge the kinship of all creatures, to use creation with gratitude and restraint, and to live virtuously within the earth community.
Download or read book Respect for Nature written by Paul W. Taylor and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2011-04-11 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What rational justification is there for conceiving of all living things as possessing inherent worth? In Respect for Nature, Paul Taylor draws on biology, moral philosophy, and environmental science to defend a biocentric environmental ethic in which all life has value. Without making claims for the moral rights of plants and animals, he offers a reasoned alternative to the prevailing anthropocentric view--that the natural environment and its wildlife are valued only as objects for human use or enjoyment. Respect for Nature provides both a full account of the biological conditions for life--human or otherwise--and a comprehensive view of the complex relationship between human beings and the whole of nature. This classic book remains a valuable resource for philosophers, biologists, and environmentalists alike--along with all those who care about the future of life on Earth. A new foreword by Dale Jamieson looks at how the original 1986 edition of Respect for Nature has shaped the study of environmental ethics, and shows why the work remains relevant to debates today.
