United States
£ GBP
Moving beyond identity politics while continuing to respect diverse entities and concerns, Whitney A. Bauman builds a planetary politics that better responds to the realities of a pluralistic world. Calling attention to the historical, political, and ecological influences shaping our understanding of nature, religion, humanity, and identity, Bauman collapses the boundaries separating male from female, biology from machine, human from more than human, and religion from science, encouraging readers to embrace hybridity and the inherent fluctuations of an open, evolving global community.
As he outlines his planetary ethic, Bauman concurrently develops an environmental ethic of movement that relies not on place but on the daily connections we make across the planet. He shows how both identity politics and environmental ethics fail to realize planetary politics and action, limited as they are by foundational modes of thought that create entire worlds out of their own logic. Introducing a postfoundational vision not rooted in the formal principles of "nature" or "God" and not based in the idea of human exceptionalism, Bauman draws on cutting-edge insights from queer, poststructural, and deconstructive theory and makes a major contribution to the study of religion, science, politics, and ecology.
Whitney A. Bauman is assistant professor of religious studies and an Honors College Fellow at Florida International University. His books include Theology, Creation, and Environmental Ethics; Grounding Religion: A Field Guide to the Study of Religion and Ecology; Inherited Land: The Changing Grounds of Religion and Ecology; and Voices of Feminist Liberation: Writings in Celebration of Rosemary Radford Ruether.
"This is a very impressive book – it is a visionary synthesis of the most important issues concerning the intersection of science, religion, politics and philosophy. Bauman weaves a complex and powerful narrative in his constitution of a planetary community. Religion and Ecology: Developing a Planetary Ethic is a unique contribution to a growing body of work that critically rethinks our ideas of nature to vitalize the possibilities of material and ecological thinking."
– Clayton Crockett, University of Central Arkansas
"Scholarship has needed this book for quite a while, one that boldly synthesizes new materialism, queer theory, ecology and spirituality."
– Tim Morton, Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English, Rice University
