The Good in Nature and Humanity: Connecting Science, Religion, and Spirituality with the Natural World - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1559638389 ISBN 13: 9781559638388

Publisher: Island Press, 2002

Synopsis

Scientists, theologians, and the spiritually inclined, as well as all those concerned with humanity's increasingly widespread environmental impact, are beginning to recognize that our ongoing abuse of the earth diminishes our moral as well as our material condition. Many people are coming to believe that strengthening the bonds among spirituality, science, and the natural world offers an important key to addressing the pervasive environmental problems we face. The Good in Nature and Humanity brings together 20 leading thinkers and writers - including Ursuia Goodenough, Lynn Margulis, Dorion Sagan, Carl Safina, David Petersen, Wendell Berry, Terry Tempest Williams, and Barry Lopez - to examine the divide between faith and reason, and to seek a means for developing an environmental ethic that will help us confront two of our most imperiling crises; global environmental destruction and an impoverished spirituality. The book explores the ways in which science, spirit, and religion can guide the experience and understanding of our ongoing relationship with the natural world and examines how the integration of science and spirituality can equip us to make wiser choices in using and managing the natural environment. The book also provides compelling stories that offer a narrative understanding of the relations among science, spirit, and nature. Grounded in the premise that neither science nor religion can by itself resolve the prevailing malaise of environmental and moral decline, contributors seek viable approaches to averting environmental catastrophe and, more positively, to achieving a more harmonious relationship with the natural world. By bridging the gap between the rational and the religious through the concern of each for understanding the human relation to creation, The Good in Nature and Humanity offers an important means for pursuing the quest for a more secure and meaningful world.

About this title

About the Author

Stephen R. Kellert is the Tweedy Ordway Professor of Social Ecology at the Yale University School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, author of Kinship to Mastery (Island Press, 1997) and The Value of Life (Island Press, 1996), and coeditor, with Edward O. Wilson, of The Biophilia Hypothesis (Island Press, 1993). Timothy J. Farnham is a doctoral candidate at the Yale University School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

Edition details

• Publisher: Island Press
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1559638389
• ISBN 13: 9781559638388
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 296
• Editor: Kellert Stephen R., Farnham Timothy