ENVI 291
Religion and the American Environmental Imagination Spring 2013
Division II Writing Skills
Cross-listed SOC 291 / REL 291
This is not the current course catalog

Class Details

This course examines the relationship between religious and environmental thought in the modern United States. Focusing on the complex and closely linked legacies of Christianity, secularism, and popular spirituality, we will explore the religious and anti-religious roots of contemporary environmental discourse. Along the way, we will pursue a set of vexing questions about environmental thought: Is environmentalism a religion? If so, what kind of religion is it? If not, why not (and why do we even ask)? Is anti-environmentalism religiously motivated? Could religion be the cause of our ecological crisis? Could it be the solution? For answers, we will look to the writings of thinkers such as John Muir, Edward Abbey, Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, and Wendell Berry, as well as a number of lesser-known authors. We will read these authors alongside recent scholarship in the social sciences and humanities to understand how their thinking was influenced by social and environmental trends such as urbanization, industrialization, immigration, and globalization. We will also ask how religion has intersected with gender, race, class, and ethnicity to shape environmental politics in the twenty-first century. Finally, we will pay particularly close attention to episodes of conflict and cooperation between the environmental movement and religious conservatives during the past forty years, and we will analyze popular religious media from this period alongside the writings and visual productions of environmentalists.
The Class: Format: seminar
Limit: 19
Expected: 19
Class#: 3362
Grading: yes pass/fail option, yes fifth course option
Requirements/Evaluation: two short essays and one long (15-18-page) research paper
Prerequisites: Environmental Studies 101 or permission of instructor
Enrollment Preferences: Environmental Studies majors and concentrators
Distributions: Division II Writing Skills
Notes: This course is cross-listed and the prefixes carry the following divisional credit:
SOC 291 Division II REL 291 Division II ENVI 291 Division II
Attributes: ENVI Humanities, Arts + Social Science Electives

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