Religious Ethics and Environmental Challenges

Religion shapes human responses to 21st century environmental challenges – discouraging some adherents from accepting scientific evidence, encouraging others to make sacrifices to preserve ecosystems, and leading still others to develop new spiritual traditions. This interdisciplinary series explores the ways diverse religious communities can, should, and do respond to contemporary environmental challenges. Many of the works will be explicitly ethical, dealing with normative commitments, applied ethics, or ethical theory; others will be theological or philosophical; still others may be social scientific descriptions. Since readers of Religious Ethics and Environmental Challenges will come from diverse academic contexts, all works will be explicit about methodology, enabling conversation across disciplines. We are particularly interested in works that 1) bring together distinct branches of scholarship to address practical or theoretical issues that cannot be addressed by one alone, (e.g. linking healthcare ethics and environmental ethics or comparing religious traditions); 2) explore under-researched religious communities, sub-communities, and traditions; or 3) investigate commonly studied religions in a novel way. We welcome monographs, edited volumes, and exemplary revised dissertations that take one of these approaches. While not all works in the series need to be normative or contemporary, all will help readers advance conversations about the ways religion aids or hinders responses to contemporary environmental challenges.