Climate Change, Religion, and our Bodily Future

Todd LeVasseur

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781978782389
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion & Science

This book explores the interface of bodies and religion by investigating the impacts human-induced global warming will have on the embodied and performed practices of religion in ecologies of place. By utilizing analytical insights from religion and nature theory, posthumanism, queer ecologies, ecological animisms, indigenous knowledges, material feminisms, and performance studies the book advocates for a need to update how religious studies theorizes bodies and religion. It does so by in the first half of the book advocating for religious studies as a field, and the academy as a whole, to take the ongoing and deleterious future impacts of climate change seriously--to re-member that those laboring as scholars in religious studies, and the communities they study, have always been bodies in material bio-ecological places--and to let this inform the questions religious studies scholars ask. The book argues that this will lead to very different forms of engaged, liberatory scholarship that demands a different type of scholarship and public advocacy for resilience in the face of climate change. The second half of the book offers case study examples of how scholars may better engage religious bodies within petrocultures, while attending to new, emerging materialist posthuman assemblages of religious bodies. This book will be of interest to those in religious studies, the environmental humanities, and those working at the interface of the body and the natural world.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface: Where to, Next, in Our Bodies, with “Climate Warming?”
• Introduction
• Part I: Theoretical Overview
• Chapter 1: Our Biocultural Future—Whither the Environment?: Planetary Regimes and Bodily Immersion
• Chapter 2: Evolutionary Antecedents and Meso-Level Creativity
• Chapter 3: Cultural Narratives and Science
• Part II: Applied Case Studies
• Chapter 4: Liquid Black Death: A Hegemon Ancient and Seductive
• Chapter 5: Bodies and Religious Dramaturgy in Places of Climate Chaos
• Chapter 6: Regenerative Thrivability and Flourishing—Ladakhi Buddhism in the Age of Climate Change: Constructing Identities and Adaptive Responses
• Chapter 7: Post-Materialist Posthuman Dramaturgies and Resilience
• Conclusion
• Afterword
• Coda
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author