What is it about?

Environmental ethics too often focuses on changing the natural environment, rather than transforming the human person. This paper illustrates a four-step process for cultivating environmental virtues: becoming more attentive, more thoughtful, more committed, more reverent, and more humble as we encounter the natural world. It re-interprets the spiritual practice of lectio divina -- a method for engaging the Christian scriptures with a willingness to be transformed by the encounter -- as a practice for encountering the natural world with a similar willingness to be transformed. No particular religious commitment is assumed.

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Why is it important?

Responding to environmental challenges is at least as much about changing who we are as humans as it is about changing the natural world in which we live. This paper illustrates a process for entering into this essential personal transformation via a practice that is grounded in Christian tradition but not dependent upon it.

Perspectives

My scholarly work is generally focused on bringing the wide-ranging cultural wisdom of the religious imagination to bear on contemporary environmental problems, without assuming any particular theological commitments among my readers. This paper extends the four-stage process of lectio divina from a practice of reading scripture religiously to a practice of reading nature religiously.

Nancy Menning
Ithaca College

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This page is a summary of: Reading Nature Religiously, Worldviews Global Religions Culture and Ecology, January 2016, Brill,
DOI: 10.1163/15685357-02002002.
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