Abstract
This book matters. If you want to penetrate a little into the philosophy of current geopolitics, read and re-read it. But you must also look very closely, if you do not want to say in the end that on this topic religion has all the answers and addresses all the big questions in a uniform voice. The method of gathering many papers from thinkers representing many different traditions—not all of them religious—does not suit such an interpretation, which depends on a rigorous engagement with one religion’s history and doctrine and cannot be argued in any other way. The many authors do not agree. On the other hand, they all take with deadly seriousness the imperative to rethink ethics, aesthetics, politics, and worship in light of the current planetary crisis. The real question is this: how can religious culture and thought mitigate climate change? What resources do they bring to the table of nations? The concept of the Anthropocene denies the fact that the answer depends on anything but the human, the anthropos. But the answer does still depend on transcendence if justice and goodness are still possible. For they are possible until we decide against transcendence and abandon value.
It is a strange and unique question that cannot be solved strictly through ‘secular’ means. A climate policy which avoids the stories of human spirit is a policy that has no real reach and stirs no mind to action. And as action fails to follow, those who cultivate such stories—the religious communities, the philosophers, theologians, and ethicists—are thrown violently from the centre of things. At the same time, the past of the humanities is freighted with eco-crimes; in the West, no concept of the sacred is innocent of lending credibility to the idea of humanity’s right to rule over nature, originally a theological idea and ideal.
These are difficult questions that no volume of essays alone can answer. But Religion in the Anthropocene takes the work that needs to be done a little further. There is heat here, but there is also light. The authors think with religion and resource its long history (much older, of course, than the recently named epoch of the Anthropocene, thought to have begun in the 1950s), yet environmental apologias for religion are—thankfully—few and far between. Throughout, the tone is constructive but also critical. It is never taken for granted that a particular religious perspective, or any religion as such, could ever get us out of this mess. Equally, religion’s embeddedness in local communities—its close connection to place, its vast, transnational network (linking organisations, peoples, and ideas across the planet)—means that it is able, perhaps uniquely, to facilitate the kind of conversations and collaborations that are needed to mitigate the worst effects of climate change. In this volume, all the dangers of religion are magnified, but so too are its formidable potential. The editors should be congratulated for putting together such a timely volume.