Description: Anthropocene Religion argues that addressing a future, and present, shaped by worldwide catastrophic climate change involves not only radically rethinking the ideas of nature, and humanity's place within it, inherited from Western modernity. It also demands a reconceptualization of the nature and role of religion. The advent of the Anthropocene simultaneously displaces the human from the centre of the world and erodes all sharp distinctions between the natural environment and the realm of human activity. Similarly, the Anthropocene renders untenable concepts of religion that rely on reference to realms, beings or forces that wholly transcend nature. It is, however, possible to understand both religion and its divine referents in worldly rather than transcendent terms, just as it is possible to understand nature as dynamic and creative. The Gaia hypothesis offers us a figure through which to approach these concepts in their interconnectedness.
Brief description: Michael Barnes Norton is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Associate Dean of the College of Humanities, Arts, Social Sciences, and Education at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.
Review Quotes: With engaging transdisciplinarity rather than off-putting panic or dogmatic demand, Michael Barnes Norton opens a fresh engagement of the complex, crucial interplay of three tricky and unavoidable concepts: the Anthropocene, nature and religion.--Catherine Keller, Drew University Theological School