Religious Studies Can Help Save the Planet

My latest post over at the State of Formation blog was recently featured, engaging with a recent post by Ivan Strenski about the latest American Academy of Religion (AAR) conference. Here’s the opening paragraph below.

Recently UC Riverside Religious Studies professor Ivan Strenski published a piece on the Religion Dispatches blog with a provocative question: can religion professors save the planet? He was responding to the American Academy of Religion’s (AAR) Annual Conference which took place last month in California, and in particular the much-discussed efforts of AAR President Laurie Zoloth to green the annual gathering of religious studies scholars. Strenski asserted that “Zoloth’s proposal, and moreover, the ethos from which it emerges, tells us everything we need to know about the malaise poisoning the study of religion in the university.” In short, he argued that attempts like Zoloth’s to get religious studies scholars to focus on environmental issues was not only misguided, but also absurd and wrong.

Read the rest here…