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1
Provencher, Olga JoAnn. "Ecofeminism and Religion: Christianity and the Ethical Approach to the Environment." UNF Digital Commons, 2013. https://digitalcommons.unf.edu/etd/482.
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In this paper I attempt to formulate the Christianity-based ecocentric ethics, to answer the ecofeminists' quest to spiritually ground such ethics; I use the living example of the practices of the Catholic ''green sisters''.
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Shehu, Muazu Usman. "Religion and the environment in Northeast Nigeria : dominion, stewardship, fatalism and agency." Thesis, University of Sheffield, 2015. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/10538/.
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This study examines religious influence on both environmental concern and behaviour, and perceptions and strategies of adaptation to environmental degradation in Northeast Nigeria. A good understanding of both dimensions of religion-environment connection is critical to theorising on the role of religion in current environmental crisis. The region provides a strong opportunity for study due to the severity of environmental degradation and the powerful role religion continues to play in all spheres of individual and community life. Drawing on sociological perspectives, the study combines statistical analysis with qualitative techniques to achieve its goals. Lynn White's hypothesis, which proposes that religion predisposes individuals to engage in negative environmental behaviours, was used as a starting point to explore the links between religion and environmental attitudes and behaviour. While the hypothesis as formulated refers to patterns of behaviour in the Judeo-Christian west, it has been widely used in both western and non-western contexts to explore the connections between religion and the environment. This proposition was explored within the study population by using qualitative analysis of interviews with congregation leaders and statistical analysis of self-reported environmental attitudes and behaviour data, obtained via questionnaires administered to members of selected Christian and Muslim congregations. The study also analyses interviews with leaders of the participating congregations and environmental protection officials to explore how faith communities understand and respond to environmental change. In partial support for White's thesis, analysis found endorsement of 'dominance-over-nature' theologies among both Christian and Muslim participants. However, there is no evidence to support White's thesis that Christians are more likely than non-Christians to believe in human dominion-over-nature when the principals are applied to this study context. Although dominion-over-nature was strongly endorsed in the questionnaire data and widely reported in the narratives of the clergy, its majority interpretation as an ethical responsibility and command to 'look after' the rest of nature casts doubt on the assumption that the dominion belief predisposes religious individuals to devalue and destroy nature in all contexts. Furthermore, the findings suggest that, contrary to the binary relationship speculated in White's hypothesis, and supported in the wider literature, dominion-over-nature involves a complex set of religious principles/beliefs that are interpreted both as 'divine authority' over nature and stewardship of nature. Moreover, analysis reveals strong evidence of three distinct motivations for pro-environmental actions, namely 'ecocentrism', 'anthropocentrism' and 'theocentrism', and a discrepancy between the principles and practices of religious environmentalism. The study then moves on from White's hypothesis to explore the broader factors affecting religious environmentalism. The study found religious environmentalism to be dependent on and constrained by additional factors, such as lack of material resources (poverty), lack of knowledge of religious and environmental principles and the social conditions under which environmental issues are prioritised. Participants' understandings of the causes of environmental change include narratives that accept scientific accounts of anthropogenic environmental problems and point to institutional failures and social conditions as the underlying causes of environmental decline. Also salient are discourses that interpret environmental change from a purely theological standpoint, where environmental change is framed either as God's way of punishing humanity's wrong deeds or as a fulfilment of 'end times' prophesies. These different and conflicting understandings of environmental change have produced different narratives on the strategies of adaptation that range from activism to fatalism, adopted by different religious groups. The study concludes with a discussion of the implications of these findings on theory and research, and environmental reform policies in the region and beyond.
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Capponi, Giovanna. "A dialogue with nature : sacrificial offerings in Candomblé religion." Thesis, University of Roehampton, 2018. https://pure.roehampton.ac.uk/portal/en/studentthesis/A-Dialogue-with-Nature(eb22cdc5-aee7-4a6e-99a0-55d9baf15ac0).html.
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The present work explores the relationships Candomblé followers interweave with the environment and with animals through ritual offerings and sacrificial practices. As a self-defined “religion of nature”, Afro-Brazilian Candomblé can be described as the cult of the orixás, deities whose origins can be traced to West Africa and who are connected with the natural elements in the landscape. The complex use of food items, other elements and animals in the rituals makes it necessary to investigate the role of these elements in Candomblé cosmology and to take into account emic perceptions of human-environment relations. Ritual practices develop around culturally determined ways of relating and perceiving the environment but they are also subjected to modifications and innovations. By presenting detailed ethnographic accounts of Candomblé rituals in Brazil but also in Italy (where a Candomblé house has been active for two decades), this thesis demonstrates how the ritual structure can be understood as a pattern that follows variations based on the needs of humans, but also on the tastes of the invisible entities and the agency of animals. The renegotiation of these elements takes the form of a dialogic process between the different parts. Ritual offerings and sacrifices can be understood not only as a form of feeding and exchanging favours with the orixás but also as a form of communication between the visible and the invisible world. Moreover, the constant correspondences and deferrals between humans, animals and orixás in the chants, in the mythology and the ritual proceedings allow the possibility of understanding animal sacrfice as being performed not only for the benefit, but also as a substitute, of a human life. Lastly, this thesis shows how ritual change is also expressed by the incorporation of contemporary notions of environmental ethics and pollution, allowing for new understandings of natural landscapes as a social and historical construct.
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Upchurch, Jeremy Eugene. "Religious Television and New Technologies: Managing Change in the Broadcast Environment." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2006. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc5336/.
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This study examines the process of technological change in the religious television environment. The study also focuses on managerial response to said change. Through the use of a survey instrument, a quantitative examination is given, illustrating a managerial embrace of change principles, a positive attitude toward the idea of change, and a system of change behavior that matches several previously theorized change models. Also examined is how different station funding types correspond with types and rates of technological change, with the results reflecting that more funding sources for a station generally indicate a greater likelihood of technological change.
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Vestrin, Söderberg Therese. "Perspektiv på naturen : En kvalitativ litteraturstudie om ekologisk hållbarhet i religionskunskap i åk 7-9." Thesis, Umeå universitet, Institutionen för idé- och samhällsstudier, 2017. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-130629.
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The purpose of the study Perspektiv på naturen i religionskunskap: en kvalitativ litteraturstudie om ekologisk hållbarhet i religionskunskap i åk 7-9 (Perspectives on nature: a qualitative literature study about ecological sustainability in the subject of religion for grades 7-9) is to contribute to the discourse on nature and environmental issues within the subject of religion in the grades 7-9, in the Swedish elementary schools. Through literary analyses of textbooks used by teachers in the municipality of Umeå. The aim of this study is to investigate whether the teachers are able to meet the goals set by the national curriculum with regard to environmental perspective and sustainability through the text books. Four textbooks have been analysed with the help of three perspectives in environmental ethics (antropocentrism, biocentrism, ekocentrism, teocentrism and deep ecology). The texts analysed were those that explicitly dealt with nature, ecological sustainability and environmental issues. The results show that, from three of the four books had very little material on the environmental issues and ecological sustainability. Only one book dealt directly with ecological sustainability, two books did not mention environmental issues and that all books had texts that referred to views on nature within all the centrisms. The texts that directly mediated a view were anthropocentric, although this was in only conveyed in one of the books. Many texts could not clearly be determined as belonging to one centrism as the length of the texts were too short.
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Usik, Katherine Anne. "The hunt for Ma’iingan: Ojibwe ecological knowledge and wolf hunting in the Great Lakes." Thesis, University of Iowa, 2015. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/1781.
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With the removal of the Gray Wolf (Canis lupus) from the United States Endangered Species Act (ESA) in 2012, several states legalized wolf hunting as part of wildlife management programs and the protection of livestock. However, the legalization of wolf hunting has created much conflict between Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations in the Great Lakes region. Many Anishinaabeg, or Ojibwe, in the states of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan object to the state-sanctioned wolf hunting because of their long-standing religious and ecological relationship to wolves as relatives. In the Anishinaabe creation story, the Creator Gitchi Manitou sent Ma'iingan, or Wolf, as a brother and companion to the original human, where the lives of Anishinaabe peoples and wolves would forever become intertwined.
While the wolf hunting conflict appears to be one between religion and the broader secular state, it is a complex issue, involving historical religious conceptions of land and power among Anishinaabe and non-Indigenous Americans. Power and traditional ecological knowledge in Anishinaabe culture originates from non-human sources, where humans must establish relationships with other-than-human beings to survive and achieve bimaadiziwin, or "the good life." In a bimaadiziwin framework, wolves are a source of power, knowledge, and well-being for humans, suggesting that they and other non-human beings are valid models of potential ways in which humans may develop ecological models and environmental relations. A methodology based on Indigenous environmental theory and non-human power may provide a broader and more inclusive framework for environmental conflicts, incorporating the roles of all the beings that are indigenous in a certain area. In my thesis, I will show how the wolf-hunting conflict in the Great Lakes region is an example of clashing hierarchical and non-hierarchical systems of relations and knowledge, and explore how an Anishinaabe wolf-based epistemology and ontology is a valid non-hierarchical ecological model for the Great Lakes region and beyond.
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Wilson, Charlene E. "Religion, spirituality & spiritual development of undergraduate students." Scholarly Commons, 2006. https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/uop_etds/632.
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Spirituality is a topic of growing interest for college students and scholars and yet personal accounts of spiritual development among college students remains limited. This study investigated the spiritual development of seven traditional-aged, University of the Pacific students in their senior year of course study. Interviews were conducted using an interview guide. Participants were requested through chain sampling techniques. Interviews were used to gain knowledge about the experiences students have that contribute to the ways in which they define spirituality and how those experiences affected them personally. Responses from interviews of Pacific students will be compared to Fowler's Stages of Faith and the work of Parks, Chickering and other's conclusions made regarding how students and people across generations and cultures develop a sense of meaning and purpose.
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Rowlatt, Linnéa. "A godly environment : religious views of nature in early sixteenth-century Strasbourg." Thesis, University of Kent, 2014. https://kar.kent.ac.uk/55002/.
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This thesis offers three case studies of religious representations of the natural world in Strasbourg from 1510 to 1541 from the perspective of the interactive model of socioeconomic metabolism. This model proposes that long-term environmental instability will exert a negative effect on human/social biophysical structures and may provoke changes in the manner in which the natural world is represented within that culture. Although direct causation is impossible to prove due to the autonomous nature of the cultural sphere, this thesis suggests that the two case studies of early sixteenth-century religious reforms in Strasbourg indicate the presence of theological innovations that changed the conceptual relationship between faithful Christians and Creation, thereby offering an enhanced capacity for adherents to exploit the metabolic opportunities in their natural environment. Further, it suggests that these cultural developments were supported and strengthened in part by the stresses society experienced from the natural world. The thesis begins with a description of the natural environment in Alsace during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, with particular attention given to the weather from 1473 to 1541. These decades spanned the coldest years of the Spörer Minimum, itself the second coldest trough of the Little Ice Age. Although weather was the most dynamic and influential element of the natural environment during this period, the model suggests that long term stress from the environment may provoke re-conceptualization of the entire natural sphere of causation. Three religious perspectives are taken as case studies in the thesis to test the model: Roman Catholic, Radical, and Evangelical Christianity. They were created temporally and geographically in proximity, but offer different theological representations of nature. Tentative conclusions arising from their juxtaposition with each other and the climatic conditions suggest that the model is helpful to better understand the complex social and cultural changes during the Reformation. The first case study focuses on Die Emeis, forty-one sermons delivered by Johann Geiler von Kaysersberg in the Liebfrauenmünster zu Strasbourg for Lent 1509. By reading against the grain of these sermons delivered by a well-known and highly respected Doctor of Theology, an orthodox Catholic representation of the natural world and the appropriate human relationship with it is revealed. This chapter also includes information about pre-Reform society in Strasbourg and Alsace, in order to provide a basis of comparison for later developments. The second case study explores three sources known to be popular with Alsatian peasants from 1515 to 1525: astrologist Leonhard Reynmann's Wetter Büchlin, Ein Fast schon büchlin by Clemens Zyegler, a lay theologian from Strasbourg, and Article IV of the Twelve Articles which formed the foundation of peasant demands during the German Peasants' War. The third case study focuses on Hexemeron Dei opus, written by Strasbourg Reformer Wolfgang Capito. An exegesis of Genesis 1-11, Capito writes explicitly of God's creation of the world for human salvation. The aftermath of the Peasants' War in Strasbourg and Alsace are described here, as well as social initiatives in Strasbourg favoured by Reformers such as welfare reform and education. The model of socioeconomic metabolism suggests that following an extended period of material insecurity and social instability caused by environmental uncertainty, cultural agents will modify the representation of nature in order to render human colonization of the natural world more effective. While it is impossible to firmly attribute causality for developments in the religious view of nature to environmental stress, it can be shown that the weather during the decades at the eve of the Protestant Reformation repeatedly limited or removed adequate metabolic intake from those disadvantaged by an increasingly unequal society, contributing to social instability which culminated in the 1525 German Peasants' War. Representations of nature in the examples studied from the new religious movements removed layers of spiritual mediation between humanity and nature which had been and continued to be accepted by the Roman Catholic Church, specifically articulating views which encouraged greater exploitation of the natural environment. Those who rebelled are known to have strongly favoured the new theologies, indicating the possibility that part of the widespread support in Alsace for reformed and radical theology may have been due to the enhanced conceptual opportunities they provided for exploiting the natural environment.
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Ross, Sasha A. Ellis Marc H. "The dilemma of justice how religion influences the political environment of post-1948 Israel and Palestine /." Waco, Tex. : Baylor University, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/2104/3006.
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Watkins, Paul Hansen. "Instructional leadership in relation to classroom environment, student enrollment, removal, and completion within LDS released-time seminaries." Scholarly Commons, 1992. https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/uop_etds/2845.
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Purpose. This study collected data that was used to determine whether principals' instructional leadership behaviors that researchers have determined to affect the teachers and students in the public school system can also be applied to the seminaries in the Church Educational System. It was hypothesized that where high incidents of instructional leadership behaviors were found in the seminary principal, teachers will perceive a more positive classroom environment, and more students will enroll, a lower percentage of students will be removed, and a higher percentage of students will complete the school year. Methodology. The research was descriptive and comparative. The study examined the relationships among three different variables: (1) The perceived behaviors of the principals were measured by administering the Principal Instructional Management Rating Scale, (2) The teachers' perceptions of the classroom environment were measured by administering the Classroom Environment Scale, (3) The enrollment totals, removal rates, and the completion rates were obtained from each seminary. Findings. This study concluded that the principals' instructional leadership behaviors that were identified in the public school system to significantly relate to a positive classroom environment and higher student outcomes did not relate significantly with seminaries in the Church Educational System. Of the 412 correlations produced by the analysis, only 26 were found to have coefficients $\ge$.30. Of the 120 possible independent variables that were regressed, only 17 significantly predicted the three dependent variables at the.10 alpha level. Each time the principals or the teachers perceived a leadership behavior it had a negative impact on the teachers' perception of friendship, innovation, and student involvement the classroom. Recommendations. Additional research could be conducted to determine: (1) Why each time the teachers or the principals perceived an instructional leadership behavior it had a negative impact on the teachers' perceptions of the classroom environment, (2) Whether new instruments that better reflect the uniqueness of the seminary classroom could determine any principals' behaviors that relate to teacher and student success measures, (3) What variables affect the seminary students' propensity to enroll, remain, and complete a full year of seminary more than the behaviors of one principal.
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Lee, Edwin Roughton, and mikewood@deakin edu au. "Presbyterian ethos and environment in the novels of John Buchan: A religious and historical study." Deakin University, 1996. http://tux.lib.deakin.edu.au./adt-VDU/public/adt-VDU20051201.153016.
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The aim of this thesis is to establish, from a historical and religious perspective, that the Presbyterian ethos and environment in which John Buchan was reared was the predominating influence in the writing of his novels.
Presbyterianism was not the only influence on Buchan that determined the character of his stories. Buchan was by temperament a romantic, and this had considerable influence on his literature. His novels are romances, peopled by romantic figures who pursue romantic adventures. There are the signs of Buchan's romantic nature in the contents of the novels: creative imagination, sensitivity to nature, and expectations of the intrusion of other worlds, with destiny-determining events to follow. But Buchan had also an acquired classicism. His studies at Glasgow and Oxford Universities brought him in touch with a whole range of the master-pieces of classical literature, especially the works of Plato and Virgil. This discipline gave him clarity and conciseness in style, and balanced the romantic element in him, keeping his work within the bounds of reason.
At the heart of Buchan's life and work, however, was his deeply religious nature and this, while influenced by romanticism and classicism, was the dominant force behind his work. Buchan did not accept in its entirety the Presbyterian doctrine conveyed to him by his father and his Church. He was moderate by temperament and shrank from excesses in religious matters, and, being a romantic, he shied away from any fixed creeds. He did embrace the fundamentals of Christianity, however, which he learned from his father and his Church, even if he did put aside the Rev. John's orthodox Calvinism. The basic Christianity which underlies all Buchan's novels has the stamp of Presbyterianism upon it, and that stamp is evident in his characters and their adventures.
The expression of Christianity which Buchan embraced was the Christian Platonism of seventeenth century theologians, who taught and preached at Cambridge University, They gave prominence to the place of reason and conscience in man's search for God, They believed that reason and conscience were the candle of the Lord which was existed every one. It was their conviction that, if that light was followed, it would lead men and women to God. They were against superstition and fanaticism in religion, against all forms of persecution for religious beliefs, and insisted that God could only be known by renouncing evil and setting oneself to live according to Gods will. This teaching Buchan received, but the stamp of his Presbyterianism was not obliterated.
The basic doctrines which arose from his father's Presbyterianism and are
to be found in Buchan's novels are as follows:
a. the fear (or awe) of God, as life's basic religious attitude;
b. the Providence of God as the ultimate determinative force in the
outcome of events;
c. the reality, malignity and universality of evil which must be forcefully
and constantly resisted;
d. the dignity of human beings in bearing God's image;
e. the conviction that life has meaning and that its ultimate goal,
therefore, is a spiritual one - as opposed to the accumulation of wealth, the achieving of recognition from society, and the gaining access to
power;
f. the necessity of challenge in life for growth and fulfilment, and the
importance of fortitude in successfully meeting such challenge;
g. the belief that, in the purpose of God, the weak confound the strong.
These emphases of Presbyterianism are to be found in all Buchan's novels, to a greater or lesser degree. All his characters are serious people, with a moral purpose in life. Like the pilgrims of the Bible, they seek a country: true fulfilment. This quest becomes more spiritual and more dearly defined as Buchan grows in age and maturity. The progress is to be traced from his early novels, where fulfilment is sought in honour and self-approving competence, as advocated by classicism; to the novels of his middle years, where fulfilment is sought in adventures suggested by romanticism. In his final novel Sick Heart River. Buchan appears to have moved somewhat from his earlier classicism and his romanticism as the road to fulfilment.
In this novel, Buchan expresses what, for him, is ultimate fulfilment: a conversion to God that produces self-sacrificing love for others. The terminally-ill Edward Leithen sets out on a romantic adventure that will enable him to die with dignity, and so, in classic style, justify his existence. He has a belief in God, but in a God who is almighty, distant and largely irrelevant to Leithen's life. In the frozen North of Canada, where he expects to find his meagre beliefs in God's absolute power confirmed by the icy majesty of mountain and plain, he finds instead God's mercy and it melts his heart. In a Christ-like way, he brings life to others through his death, believing that, through death, he will find life.
There is sufficient evidence to give plausibility to the view that Buchan is describing in Leithen his own pilgrimage. If so, it means that Buchan found his way back to the fundamental experience of the Christian life, conversion, so strongly emphasised in his orthodox Presbyterianism home and Church. However, Buchan reaches this conclusion in a Christian Platonist way, through the natural world, rather than through the more orthodox pathway of Scripture.
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Lin, Yih-Ren. "The environmental beliefs and practices of Taiwanese Buddhists." Thesis, University College London (University of London), 1999. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.312753.
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This thesis explores the phenomenon of Taiwanese Buddhists' environmental concerns as they occurred in the 1990s. A socio-cultural perspective is adopted to enquire into the following questions: (1) what does 'Huan-Bao' (Jl-1*-, literally environmental protection) mean to Taiwanese Buddhists? (2) are there patterns of Buddhist environmental concerns? (3) how do Taiwanese Buddhists construct their environmental concerns? (4) what is their relationship with Taiwan's environmental movements? and (5) have their environmental concerns any relevance to the development of Buddhism in Taiwan? The field work was carried out from Jan. 1996 to Aug. 1997 by employing several different qualitative methods. Three Buddhist-centred organizations' 'Huan-Baos' were researched from both institutional and individual levels. These organizations are: TzuChi Charity Foundation, Dharma Drum Mountain, and Life Conservationist Association. An integrated framework of discourse analysis was developed through reviewing Maarten Hajer, David Harvey, Klaus Eder, and Kay Milton's works. Based on their works, this framework emphasizes the power of discourse coalitions, the dynamics of social process, the globalization of environmental particularisms, and the formation of individual and institutional identities. In summary, the study finds that: (1) Taiwanese Buddhist 'Huan-Bao' discourses are constructed through Buddhist Masters' re-interpretations and lay Buddhists' social practices, namely: Tzu-Chi's 'Cherishing Fu (tit, literally good fortune)'~ DDM's 'Pureland on Earth'~ and LCA's 'Life Respecting'. Though hardly challenging the 'ecological modernity' theme that is dominant in Taiwan's environmental movements, these discourses, nevertheless, demonstrate a special spiritual dimension that was rarely found before. (2) The social practices of lay Buddhists play an important role in defining and redefining what 'Huan-Bao' means to them. This social process not only enriches and reshapes the institutional definitions of 'Huan-Bao' but also helps to create individual identities. More importantly, it allows practitioners to 'dwell securely' in Taiwan where a rapid social change and insecurity are often experienced. In this way, this trend of Buddhist Huan-Bao discourse has become well situated in the phase of 'place making' of Taiwan's environmental movements. (3) The distinctive interpretation of'Huan-Bao' by each Buddhist organization suggests a unique social process behind each organization's evolution of 'Huan-Bao' discourse. These multiple meanings of 'Huan-Bao' and associated social processes manifest a new developmental stage of Taiwanese Buddhism characterized by rationalization, secularization, and contextualization. (4) This study establishes a bridge for dialogue with the search for an eastern religious environmental ethic that has for a long time been romanticized and stereotyped in western environmental movements. The study not only illustrates how the dynamics of social change cannot be separated from Buddhists' heightened environmental awareness, but also challenges the over-simplified assumptions that western environmentalists make about the environmental beliefs of' eastern religions'.
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Apawu, Jones Kofi. "Senses and Local Environment: The Case of Larabanga in the Northern Region of Ghana." Thèse, Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/23107.
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This study argues that the sensory order employed during everyday activities deepens our understanding of local people’s relations with the environment. This study was conducted in Larabanga, Ghana, employing anthropology of the senses and phenomenology. The study reveals that people acquire ways of doing things and organizing their lives through their sensory engagement with their environment. Their engagement is further highlighted by the way they make themselves a home in their environment which informs about these sensory orders.
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Dare, Ben. "Foundations of 'Ecological Reformation' : a critical study of Jürgen Moltmann's contributions towards a 'New Theological Architecture' for environment care." Thesis, Cardiff University, 2012. http://orca.cf.ac.uk/37723/.
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Jürgen Moltmann’s desire to see the relationship between humans and our natural environment improve is long-standing. In later years he called for a ‘new theological architecture’ to help facilitate an ‘ecological reformation’ of Christianity and society. While Moltmann did not claim to have created this new architecture, one of his work’s aims has clearly been to contribute towards it. To what extent has Moltmann been successful in this aim? Firstly, his doctrine of the Trinity provides the themes of love and relatedness which pervade and colour his whole project. These themes then interact with other key areas of Moltmann’s thought that inform this architecture: creation, God’s ongoing care and openness towards creation (largely pneumatology and christology), and eschatology. Each of these areas contribute to a theological architecture in which non-human creation, past, present, and future, is a full recipient of God’s uniting love and openness. Naturally this leads towards a consideration of the ecological reformation. Less positively, Moltmann’s discussion of God’s creating through self-restriction presents some problems for this architecture’s coherence, although Moltmann’s developing views on this do help provide a solution. Furthermore, analysis of the criticisms made by various commentators suggests that several debated areas are actually particularly productive for Moltmann’s contributions to the architecture. Other criticisms do highlight areas of concern and possible development, but do not present terminal problems. The potential for this architecture to address practice, not simply theory, increases through elements of Moltmann’s theological anthropology that challenge humanity’s behaviour. Those elements thus form a lens through which Moltmann’s wider contributions to the architecture more powerfully speak of the need for creation care. Therefore, while Moltmann’s contribution towards a new architecture for ecological reformation would be helped by certain modifications, nevertheless it is highly significant. Its wide scope makes it fertile for further contributions and development.
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Zandstra, Robert. "The Nature of the Secular: Religious Orientations and Environmental Thought in Nineteenth-Century American Literature." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/23099.
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My dissertation argues that changes in the structures and orientations of religious thought, changes commonly understood as secularization, have provided the intellectual underpinnings for the modern exploitation and ongoing destruction of the non-human world, which extend to the underwriting the devaluing and dehumanization of marginalized groups such as Native Americans. My work makes visible the secular assumptions of ecocriticism, which tends to blame Christianity for environmental problems. It also unwittingly relies on state-legitimating constructions of religion, simplistic religious-secular binaries, and outdated, false narratives of secularization. I theorize an ecocriticism “with/out the secular” to analyze secularity in both “secular” and “religious” settings, using the category of “religious orientation,” a tacit, pre-theoretical commitment that directs ultimate trust, structures meaning as it coheres in everyday life, and shapes ontological, epistemological, ethical, and other theories.
I examine how certain nineteenth-century authors, including Henry Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, and Pequot minister William Apess, resisted this secularization within contemporaneous American culture and Christianity because of its epistemic devaluing of the natural world. Each of these authors has been read as an exemplar of secularization, but such interpretations reveal more about the secular commitments of literary critics than about the authors and their contexts. I show instead how modern religious constructions do not necessarily correlate with the deeper religious orientation of an author or the secularity or non-secularity of his or her arguments. Dickinson’s poetry and Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers challenge dogmatic conceptions of heaven and Sabbath that are structured dualistically so as to devalue everyday earthly life. Yet they do so in non-dualistic ways that accord with a biblically rooted religious orientation of creation-fall-redemption-consummation. Their struggles against the church were against the church’s acceptance of dominant secularist ideologies that are ultimately at odds with Christianity and sustainable lifeways. Similarly, William Apess’ environmental justice work as a Native Christian against institutions dominated by white nationalist ideology demonstrate the how dualistic structures of secularity legitimate racism in conjunction with an anthropocentric that devalue the natural world.
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Bridges, Sarah Ann. "Disability in the Mountains: Culture, Environment, and Experiences of Disability in Ladakh, India." Case Western Reserve University School of Graduate Studies / OhioLINK, 2016. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1442843791.
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Herrera, Christina M. "Expanding the Notion of Campus Climate: the Effect of Religion and Spirituality on the Perception of Campus Climate." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2015. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc804898/.
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Religion/spirituality is a salient facet of identity for many college students, yet addressing issues related to spirituality/religion is contentious in many higher education institutions. Prior research has shown that various other facets of identity, including race/ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation, affect a student’s perception of campus climate, but religious/spiritual identity has not been examined in the same manner. Using confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling, this study empirically tests the addition of religion/spirituality to the campus climate theory developed by Hurtado et al. (1999). Data came from the 2010 College Senior Survey administered by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles. Results indicate that religious and spiritual identity have significant direct effects on the perception and other aspects of campus climate. Future research is needed to extend the understanding between religious and spiritual identity and the perception of campus climate.
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Barth, Whittney Layne. "Interpreting the Eleventh Commandment: A Look at Creation Care and Its Role in American Politics." Miami University Honors Theses / OhioLINK, 2008. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=muhonors1209050053.
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Gaunt, Cary Hauptman. "Toward a More Wholly Communion: Cultivating Ecological Enlightenment and Sustainable Action in Christians." Antioch University / OhioLINK, 2009. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=antioch1271950471.
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Benedetti, Alexa Leigh. "Civil Religion Iconography : A New Theoretical Perspective Regarding Public Art." Thesis, Uppsala universitet, Teologiska institutionen, 2021. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-445889.
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Based on the idea that public art reflects cultural values and is meant, not as many have argued as a means of teaching history, but rather as a means of promoting cultural ideals, public art serves a role in lauding people and behaviors and reflects an important facet in the creation of a national identity and ethos. Further, that in this function of promoting societal norms, public art serves as an iconography of a “civil religion” which tells a story to the citizenry about what a given country admires, reveres and aspires to and promotes a specific moral narrative regarding a country and its people. Thus, public art forms an iconography reflecting the norms of the “civil religion” and its related mores, morals and ethical values.
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Lehane, John. "The experiences of Western Australian Muslims within the current political and social environment." Thesis, Edith Cowan University, Research Online, Perth, Western Australia, 2020. https://ro.ecu.edu.au/theses/2400.
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The purpose of this research was to examine the experiences of Western Australian (WA) Muslims, within the context of the current Australian political and social climate, with a key focus on how political and social factors, and the vast introduction of Australian antiterrorism legislation, may impact them. Also explored in this inquiry, was how mainstream media and their regular portrayal of Islamic-inspired terrorist attacks, which has at times connected all Muslims to these atrocities, is creating a social division within the Australian community which is difficult to overcome.
A generic qualitative methodology was utilised to best capture the lived experiences of the participants involved in this research, which concluded that the WA Muslims interviewed had all experienced differing levels of prejudice, racism and discrimination from fellow WA residents (Non-Muslims), with a perception that western media (including social media) is largely responsible for this phenomenon.
The implications of this phenomena highlighted the need for Federal and State government to work closer with WA Muslims and to involve them more in the introduction of new anti-terrorism legislation, so that unbiased and non-discriminatory laws can be established. This thesis further highlights the need for media organisations and public figures, to accurately report on Australian Muslims and on the Islam religion itself, and not create links to Islamic-inspired atrocities occurring around Australia and the world, to all the followers of this Islamic faith.
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Bridges, Alex Wallace. "Two Monasteries in Ladakh: Religiosity and the Social Environment in Tibetan Buddhism." Case Western Reserve University School of Graduate Studies / OhioLINK, 2017. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1491502573183253.
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Wetzel, David Scott. "Book of Mormon Atonement Doctrine Examined in Context of Atonement Theology in the Environment of its Publication." BYU ScholarsArchive, 2012. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/3297.
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Alexander Campbell, a contemporary of Joseph Smith, was the first to publish a critique of the Book of Mormon after actually having read it. Among other allegations, he arraigned that Joseph Smith wrote the book to resolve, with a voice of prophecy, theological issues contemporary to its publication. This study undertakes to examine Campbell's charge with regard to atonement doctrine. To assess the statement, this study first identifies the controversies about atonement doctrine in the years prior to the publication of the Book of Mormon, in the Northeastern region of the United States. It then compares the teachings inherent to those controversies to Book of Mormon atonement doctrine. This study concludes that the doctrine in the Book of Mormon does appear to resolve some of the controversies surrounding the doctrine of the atonement in the time and place relative to its publication. However, on other important points of controversy, it does not resolve the issues. Furthermore, as it expounds atonement doctrine, it combines concepts in ways not germane to its environment. It does not fit any model of soteriology that was prevalent in the time period and place of its original publication.
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Higgs, Michael John. "The impact of the Western conceptualization of the Christian gospel on its communication in a non-Western environment, with particular reference to the AmaXhosa." Thesis, University of Fort Hare, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/10353/356.
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This thesis examines the extent and nature of the impact of the contextualization of Christianity upon the amaXhosa from the missionary irruption in the nineteenth century to the present day, and proceeds to examine the implications of this impact for the presentation of the Christian gospel in the contemporary Eastern Cape. Chapter One describes the problem, offers definitions of key concepts and outlines the procedural method for the rest of the thesis. Chapter Two deals with the question of the cross-cultural communication of the Christian gospel in theory. Doctrinal questions such as the nature of the gospel are examined. The basic hermeneutical issue of the categorization of doctrinal tenets according to whether they are required or simply permitted is discussed in terms of Osborne's categories: 'cardinal', 'non-cardinal'. Tenets which are found to be 'anti-scriptural' would be rejected. Specific hermeneutical topics such as language and meaning, symbolics, textuality and orality are then discussed. This is followed by a survey of secular influences which affect a conceptualization. This chapter is preparatory to, and definitive for, the discourse which follows. Chapter Three outlines the cultural heritage from which the Western missionary contextualization of Christianity developed. It shows the extent to which this presentation of the gospel was dependent upon the philosophy which Britain and Europe inherited from the classical Greek culture. More modern developments such as the Enlightenment, Empiricism and Historicism bring the discourse up to the point at which the missionaries arrived. Chapter Four deals with the initial encounter between the missionaries and the amaXhosa. A brief account is given of the nature of the religious and spiritual aspects of the Xhosa culture which first encountered Christianity. The doctrinal section of this chapter deals with those doctrines in the missionary message which became issues for the amaXhosa. The hermeneutical section shows how the cultural setting of the West (vii) affected both the contextualization by the missionaries and the conceptualization by the amaXhosa. To a large extent, the missionaries made the double mistake of imposing their culture on the amaXhosa and failing to accord respect, even recognition, to the Xhosa culture. This amounted to imperialism, which, together with the political imperialism of Britain as the colonizing power, evoked responses from the Xhosa community which are outlined in section 4.4, including those of Nxele and Ntsikana. Because the impact of the Western contextualization is an on-going phenomenon, the thesis continues to trace its development up to the present time. Apartheid is briefly mentioned in Chapter Five. The point is made that all white people were perceived by the amaXhosa to be Christians, and the architects and practitioners of apartheid claimed to be Christians. This ideology therefore had a direct effect on the Xhosa conceptualization of the gospel. The architects of apartheid actually believed that they were accepting God's gift and mandate. This chapter includes Black theological reaction to apartheid in terms of the South African version of Liberation theology. Chapter Six returns to Western Theology in order to bring the sphere of discourse from the point at which it left off at the end of Chapter Three up to the present time. The schools of thought in this period are: Secularism and Existentialism, together with their theological extension, Demythologization. The main religious movements are the Charismatic Movement and Neo-Pentecostalism. Postmodernism came as a later philosophical school, to be followed by Globality. Chapter Seven deals with black South African reactive and proactive responses. The predominant theologies are those of Dwane, Buthelezi, Boesak and Mtuze. Although Dwane, Buthelezi and Boesak came on the scene at the same time as the black theologians reviewed in Chapter Five, their work is placed here because it differs significantly from the more radical responses of the latter. Mtuze is post-apartheid, and responds to the developments outlined in Chapter Six. Chapter Eight draws the findings of the thesis together, by considering how the Christian Gospel ought to be presented to the various contemporary sub-cultures of the amaXhosa. (viii) The last Chapter applies the findings of the thesis to the task in hand. The desired outcomes are listed and briefly discussed. The task ahead is enunciated in terms of manpower and other resources for the effective communication of the Christian gospel in the twenty-first century. The past, present and projected programmes of the Bible Institute Eastern Cape [the target institution] are described and assessed. Finally, topics which presented themselves in the course of the preparation of this thesis are suggested for future research.
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Hague, Alice. "Faithful advocates : faith communities and environmental activism in Scotland." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/31101.
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This thesis investigates local-level environmental activism in faith communities, and aims to understand what explains environmental advocacy by Christian faith communities. It asks why Christian communities are participating in environmental advocacy, and identifies the motivations and practices behind their engagement. Faith-based organisations and faith communities are increasingly active in environmental advocacy, both through high-level interventions, and local-level action. While high-level engagement often attracts widespread attention, as in the case of the Pope’s 2015 environmentally-focused encyclical, the engagement of locally-grounded faith communities is often overlooked, both in academia and practice. This thesis aims to fill that void by exploring faith-based environmentalism from the perspective of the local faith community. It takes an ethnographic approach, based on twelve months of participant observation in three Christian congregations in Edinburgh engaged in environmental action. Building on earlier studies of religion and ecology and religious environmentalism, this thesis argues that environmental engagement is explained by theological motivations, and also by practical factors expressed and experienced in the social context of the local faith community. Theologically, faith communities base their environmental engagement within a broad framework of justice, understanding the natural environment as God’s creation, and aligning a Christian responsibility to ‘care for creation’ with recognition of the impacts of climate change and environmental degradation on those least equipped to respond. Yet theology alone cannot explain this advocacy. Engagement is motivated by a sense of community and, more pragmatically, is also explained by everyday issues that reflect the reality of life in a faith community. It is in the social context of the faith community that these factors are brought together. Above all, the research findings emphasise the importance of community, understood both as people and place, as a key underlying factor explaining engagement. By highlighting the central role of community in environmental advocacy, this thesis offers insight into religious environmentalism that prioritises the everyday, ‘lived’ experience of religion, and articulates the importance of the social context in which religion is practiced for understanding engagement.
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Goodrich, Sarah. "Human-Nature Relationship And Faery Faith In The American Pagan Subculture." ScholarWorks @ UVM, 2015. http://scholarworks.uvm.edu/graddis/402.
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Within American religious culture, there is a small but significant and growing movement that overlaps and interacts with the environmental movement. It's known by many names, including Contemporary Paganism, Neo-Paganism, Earth Religion, and Nature Religion. A few years of observation at Starwood Festival, the largest annual Pagan gathering in North America, revealed that many individuals who identify as Pagan (or Wiccan, Druid, animist, or another of the identities that fall under the Pagan umbrella) include in their spiritual practice engagement with faeries or other nature spirits. My research employed qualitative methods including participant observation and interviews to examine the extent to which engagement with faeries and other nature spirits among Pagan festival attendees affects their relationships with nature and their behaviors in the natural world. The Pagan understanding of the Earth and all of its inhabitants and elements as animate or inspirited, as exemplified in the phenomenon of faery faith, conflates the wellbeing of the Earth and wild nature with the psychological wellbeing of each individual human, making this worldview highly compatible with the emerging field of ecopsychology. Drawing on theories of enchantment, consciousness, multiple realities, imagination, and play, my interpretations of the stories of my informants contribute additional perspective to the contemporary practice of Paganism as a small but growing countercultural movement within the dominant Western culture, particularly as it informs the human-(in)-nature relationship.
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Gabriels, Cecilia Edna. "Spirituality in the workplace : raising HR awareness /." Thesis, [S.l. : s.n.], 2008. http://dk.cput.ac.za/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1002&context=td_cput.
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Breytenbach, Marissa Cornelia. "Die invloed van gemeentedemografie op die fisieke aktiwiteit- en stressimptoomindeks by N.G. predikante / Marissa Cornelia Breytenbach." Thesis, North-West University, 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/10394/659.
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Research among ministers showed that they are experiencing high levels of stress
due to career demands and having to cope with problems on their own (Grosch &
Olsen, 2000:260). This has a detrimental effect on their health (Andrew, 1997:SO).
Participation in physical activity have positive effects on the physical and
psychological well being. Physical activity decrease work stress and increase
work satisfaction and -stamina (Dreyer & Strydom, 1992:28).
The objectives of this study was to determine the profiles of physical activity
participation and the incidence of stress symptoms in relation to congregation type
and congregation size in ministers, as well as the influence of physical activity on the
relationship between stress symptoms and congregation demography (type and size).
Congregation demography was divided into congregation type (location) as well as
congregation size (number of church members).
In this study a single cross sectional design that has been based on an availability
profile has been used. The subjects were 340 ministers of the Dutch Reformed
Church, who volunteered to participate in the study. The quality of participation in
physical activity was determined with Sharkey's (1997:432) physical activity index
The incidence of stress symptoms was determined with Burn's (1988) stress index and
the congregation demography was determined by a self-reported questionnaire.
The data was analysed by means of a one-way analysis of variance. From the data it is
clear that the majority of the respondents were physically inactive and have a low
incidence of stress symptoms in relation to congregation demography. The results of
the stress symptoms may be attributed to the fact that religion and belief in God may
play a vital role in the management of stress. Physical activity participation indicated
a statistical significant (p≤0.05) influence on the relationship between stress
symptoms and congregation demography. A highly practical significant difference
(ES≥0.8) existed between high active and low active ministers working in
congregations in rural areas. Physical activity participation also showed a moderate
practical significant influence (ES≥0.5) on the relationship between stress symptoms
and congregation demography (type and size).
It was concluded that physical activity presented a salutogenic effect on psychological
well-being among ministers and that congregation demography can influence physical
and psycho-emotional health threats of Dutch Reformed ministers.Thesis (M.A. (Human Movement Science))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2005.
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Paz, Anthony. "The Tensions of Karma and Ahimsa: Jain Ethics, Capitalism, and Slow Violence." FIU Digital Commons, 2016. http://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/2476.
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This thesis investigates the nature of environmental racism, a by-product of “slow violence” under capitalism, from the perspective of Jain philosophy. By observing slow violence through the lens of Jain doctrine and ethics, I investigate whether the central tenets of ahimsa and karma are philosophically anti-capitalist, and if there are facets within Jain ethics supporting slow violence. By analyzing the ascetic and lay ethical models, I conclude that the maximization of profit and private acquisition of lands/resources are capitalist attributes that cannot thrive efficiently under a proper Jain ethical model centered on ahimsa (non-harm, non-violence) and world-denying/world-renouncing practices. Conversely, karma and Jain cosmology has the potential to support slow violence when considering their philosophical and fatalistic implications. Furthermore, by connecting the theory of slow violence with the theory of microaggressions, I assert that, while resolving microaggressions, Jainism’s highly individualistic ethical system can hinder confronting slow violence.
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Rindahl, Steven G. "Preaching to U.S. soldiers: balancing the restrictions of the establishment clause with the guarantee of the free exercise clause considering the pluralistic U.S. military environment, with a focus on Fort Hood chapel services /." London : Spurgeon's College, University of Wales, 2006. http://dx.doi.org/10.2986/tren.118-0001.
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Cato, Stephanie. "In Support of Lynn White: Rethinking Christian Theology in light of the Ecological Crisis." Honors in the Major Thesis, University of Central Florida, 2007. http://digital.library.ucf.edu/cdm/ref/collection/ETH/id/1161.
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This item is only available in print in the UCF Libraries. If this is your Honors Thesis, you can help us make it available online for use by researchers around the world by following the instructions on the distribution consent form at http://library.ucf.edu/Systems/DigitalInitiatives/DigitalCollections/InternetDistributionConsentAgreementForm.pdf You may also contact the project coordinator, Kerri Bottorff, at kerri.bottorff@ucf.edu for more information.Bachelors
Arts and Humanities
Humanities
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Shearer, Megan Marie. "Tibetan Buddhism and the environment: A case study of environmental sensitivity among Tibetan environmental professionals in Dharamsala, India." CSUSB ScholarWorks, 2005. https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd-project/2904.
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The purpose of this study was to investigate environmental sensitivity among environmental professionals in a culture that is assumed to hold an ecocentric perspective. Nine Tibetan Buddhist environmental professionals were surveyed in this study. Based on an Environmental Sensitivity Profile Insytrument, an environmental sensitivity profile for a Tibetan Buddhist environmental professional was created from the participants demographic and interview data. The most frequently defined vaqriables were environmental destruction/development, education and role models.
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Dauer, Quinn. "Natural Disasters and Comparative State-Formation and Nation-Building: Earthquakes in Argentina and Chile (1822-1939)." FIU Digital Commons, 2012. http://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/764.
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Natural disasters in Argentina and Chile played a significant role in the state-formation and nation-building process (1822-1939). This dissertation explores state and society responses to earthquakes by studying public and private relief efforts reconstruction plans, crime and disorder, religious interpretations of catastrophes, national and transnational cultures of disaster, science and technology, and popular politics. Although Argentina and Chile share a political border and geological boundary, the two countries provide contrasting examples of state formation. Most disaster relief and reconstruction efforts emanated from the centralized Chilean state in Santiago. In Argentina, provincial officials made the majority of decisions in a catastrophe’s aftermath. Patriotic citizens raised money and collected clothing for survivors that helped to weave divergent regions together into a nation. The shared experience of earthquakes in all regions of Chile created a national disaster culture. Similarly, common disaster experiences, reciprocal relief efforts, and aid commissions linked Chileans with Western Argentine societies and generated a transnational disaster culture. Political leaders viewed reconstruction as opportunities to implement their visions for the nation on the urban landscape. These rebuilding projects threatened existing social hierarchies and often failed to come to fruition. Rebuilding brought new technologies from Europe to the Southern Cone. New building materials and systems, however, had to be adapted to the South American economic and natural environment. In a catastrophe’s aftermath, newspapers projected images of disorder and the authorities feared lawlessness and social unrest. Judicial and criminal records, however, show that crime often decreased after a disaster. Finally, nineteenth-century earthquakes heightened antagonism and conflict between the Catholic Church and the state. Conservative clergy asserted that disasters were divine punishments for the state’s anti-clerical measures and later railed against scientific explanations of earthquakes.
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Bush, Evelyn Louise. "Radical Environmentalism and Religion." W&M ScholarWorks, 1996. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd/1539626083.
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Zarbakhsh, Hallie Ida. "The Potential of Islamic Finance for Environmental Sustainability and Social Equity in Iran." Ohio University Honors Tutorial College / OhioLINK, 2016. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ouhonors1461334909.
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Bushby, Elizabeth. "Towards a Coherent Sustainability Ethics : A study on the meaning and moral underpinnings in Sustainability and their relation to consequential and deontological perspectives." Thesis, Uppsala universitet, Teologiska institutionen, 2017. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-331553.
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The idea of writing this essay begun as an attempt to enter into the current discussion about the theory and ethics of sustainability. The essay aims to compare the meaning of sustainability with two ethical theories that are currently used in developmental and environmental issues, namely the theories of Martha Nussbaum and Peter Singer, and see how coherent these theories are with the concept of sustainability. In order to achieve the essays aims, the study will have to discuss first issues regarding the ‘meaning of sustainability’ and discuss the challenges in its conceptualisation to finally outline a reasonable framework meaning for sustainability. The paper contributes in this way in forming consistency between what the conceptualisation of sustainability represents and how ethical systems could be more coherent with these conceptualisation efforts. This essay aims to answer how deontological and utilitarian perspectives provide guidance regarding sustainability and if these perspectives are coherent with sustainability as a concept. The essay understands coherence as ideas or structures that are logically compatible and that logically support each other. This study concludes that there is a possibility to delineate a coherent meaning for sustainability as a two-level meaning structure; one formal meaning where we found the principle of sustainability and without which, we would not be talking about sustainability and a second level, called the substantive meaning, where four main ethical relations arise, and where obligations and responsibilities appear. The study also concludes that there are certainly fundamental moral ideals and moral ideas embedded in sustainability that have the potential to be agreed upon in a global consensus. The formal meaning of continuance (sustainability moral ideal) gives in turn some fundamental moral ideas (normative relations) at a second level of definition. Additionally, the study shows that it is not self-evident which ethical model is more or less coherent with sustainability but the results indicate that a strong, coherent and egalitarian idea about the value of life, whether as flourished and functional as opportunities and interests, on which many of today's ethical systems are based on, can help an ethical system to be more coherent with the meaning of sustainability.
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Santos, Renan William dos. "A salvação agora é verde: ambientalismo e sua apropriação pela Igreja Católica." Universidade de São Paulo, 2017. http://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/8/8132/tde-04102017-124158/.
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Este trabalho se propõe a analisar sociologicamente a incorporação e transmutação pela Igreja Católica de um dos mais candentes temas da atualidade: a questão ecológica. A análise contou com o uso de um banco de dados no qual foram compilados praticamente todos os discursos pontifícios disponíveis sobre ecologia, desde o primeiro, proferido por Paulo VI, em 1970, passando por João Paulo II e Bento XVI, até chegar aos primeiros anos do pontificado de Francisco, que se colocou sob os holofotes mundiais com sua encíclica ecológica Laudato Si. Primeiramente, foi feita uma reconstrução histórica dos contextos sociais que moldaram o surgimento e desenvolvimento das preocupações ambientais, ainda sem o envolvimento da Igreja Católica. Para a condução da análise, foram construídos três tipos ideais de ambientalismo: o esotérico, o racionalista e o moralista. Esse último dividido entre os subtipos intra e extramundano. Diferentes reflexões ambientalistas foram examinadas por meio dessa tipologia. Demonstrou-se como as causas apontadas e as soluções propostas podem seguir variadas direções conforme o sentido atribuído ao meio ambiente. Por vezes, essas perspectivas não só se diferenciam, mas também se contrapõem. Incluindo-se tardiamente nessa discussão, a Igreja Católica muitas vezes procurou desqualificar os raciocínios ecológicos presentes nas demais perspectivas, que poderiam redundar em concepções pagãs ou materialistas, contrárias a fé cristã. A Igreja Católica tem efetuado uma série de novas interpretações de seus tradicionais ensinamentos, como a teologia da criação, postulando que é o abandono dessa orientação religiosa que gerou a crise ambiental. Além disso, não haveria como purificar o meio ambiente físico sem antes purificar o meio ambiente humano, pois ambos teriam sido poluídos pelo pecado. A solução da crise ecológica dependeria, desse modo, de mudanças comportamentais em consonância com a moralidade tradicionalmente pregada pela orientação católica. Por fim, explicita-se como essa forma conservadora com a qual a Igreja Católica lida com o problema ambiental está relacionada ao processo de secularização.This work proposes to analyze sociologically the incorporation and transmutation by the Catholic Church of one of the most appealing topics of today: the ecological question. The analysis included the use of a database in which practically all the pontifical discourses available on ecology were compiled. It encompasses the first one, pronounced by Pope Paul VI in 1970, and also John Paul II and Benedict XVI and the first years of Pope Francis pontificate, who placed himself under the worldwide spotlight with his ecological encyclical Laudato Si. First, a historical reconstruction of the social contexts that shaped the emergence and development of environmental concerns was made, still without the involvement of the Catholic Church. For conducting the analysis, three ideal types of environmentalism were built: the esoteric, the rationalist and the moralist. That last one is split into the intramundane and extramundane subtypes. Different environmentalist reflections were examined using this typology. It was demonstrated how the causes identified and the solutions proposed may follow different directions according to the meaning given to the environment. Sometimes, such perspectives not only differentiate but oppose each other. Included latter in this discussion, the Catholic Church often sought to disqualify the ecological reasoning presented by other perspectives, which could result in pagan or materialistic conceptions, contrary to the Christian faith. The Catholic Church has come up with a series of new interpretations of its traditional teachings, such as the theology of creation, postulating that it is the abandonment of the religious orientation that raised the environmental crisis. In addition, there would be no way to purify the physical environment without first purifying the human environment, because both have been polluted by sin. The solution of ecological crisis would depend, therefore, of behavioral changes in consonance with the morality preached by the traditional Catholic orientation. Finally, it was explained how this conservative way with which the Catholic Church faces the environmental problem is related to the process of secularization.
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Emil, Luana Rosado. "Habitar entre dois : etnografia com a egbé do Ilê Asè Omi Olodô, em Porto Alegre, RS." reponame:Biblioteca Digital de Teses e Dissertações da UFRGS, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10183/104891.
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Este trabalho é uma etnografia com a comunidade do Ilê Asè Omi Olodô, terreiro de Batuque localizado na Vila São José, em Porto Alegre, realizada no período de 2011 a 2013. Essa comunidade de terreiro se assemelha à maioria dos terreiros da cidade em termos socioeconômicos, localizando-se em uma região periférica; contudo, é uma comunidade que se diferencia pelo posicionamento político ao refletir míticosocialmente sobre si mesma. Desse modo, o foco da presente etnografia é a descrição da eco(cosmo)logia de matriz africana observada em campo, considerando que ela se faz entre-dois mundos, o “ocidental” e o de matriz africana. Essa dissertação percorre a narrativa dessa experiência com a comunidade dentro e fora do terreiro, buscando explicitar essa forma de habitar (entre) dois mundos. A partir dessa perspectiva, buscase demonstrar que há uma metodologia do ambiente que inicia no corpo. O ambientecorpo é percebido na relação entre os momentos cotidianos e os momentos rituais; entre eles, percebe-se o fazer-se das habilidades e das potências que emergem da orisálidade. Assim, a Antropologia Ecológica de Tim Ingold contribui para narrar o aprendizado obtido na vivência no Ilê Asè Omi Olodô enquanto localidade cosmopolítica. Além disso, a narrativa se orienta no sentido de descrever a vivência da afrocentridade, da ancestralidade, da oralidade, da complementaridade e da circularidade.This work is an ethnography of community from Ilê Asè Omi Olodô (terreiro de Batuque) located in Vila Sao Jose in Porto Alegre, Brazil, from 2011 up to 2013. This terreiro shares attributes with other terreiros, such as their peripheral location in the city and their ritual practices. It is very distinct, however, in terms of political orientation and self-reflective practices over mythical and social themes. Therefore, this research work aims to describe the eco(cosmo)logy – rooted in African origins – observed in the field, considering that it is established between two worlds, occidental-based and African-based. From that standpoint, the objective is to demonstrate the existence of a methodology of the environment whose starting point is the body. The bodyenvironment is perceived in the relation of the daily and the ritual moments; among them, it is possible to see the abilities and potentialities emerged from the orisálidade. Hence, the Ecological Antropology by Tim Ingold contributes to narrate the learning process experienced in Ilê Asè Omi Olodô as a cosmopolitical location. Besides, the narrative is oriented in order to describe the experience of afrocentricity, ancestrality, oral tradition, complementarity and circularity.
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Lykes, Valerie A. "Local environmental attitudes, global environmental attitudes, and religion| An analysis in 47 nations." Thesis, University of Nevada, Reno, 2016. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=10126141.
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Religion as culture shapes the worldview of its subscribers and thence attitude formation and preferences of individuals towards many topics including the environment. Research interest in the impact of religion soared in the late 1960s, in response to White's (1967) article in Science claiming that a huge burden of guilt for the environment crisis rested on the shoulders of Christianity. Although this Dominion Hypothesis highlights the contrast between Christianity and other religions, the contrast has not been addressed in systematic comparative cross-national research assessing whether Christians hold more negative environmental attitudes than other world religions. This dissertation fills that research gap. The Dominion Hypothesis does not exhaust the potential impacts of religion on environmentalism. For example, social psychology posits the importance of experience as well as of culture on attitudes about matters one encounters directly, so the dissertation posits the Direct Experience Hypothesis and confirms the differentiation of local from global environmental attitudes. Moreover, social psychology also directs our attention to the Reverence Hypothesis, that a subjective side effect of religiosity is reverence and responsibility for nature. To address the Dominion Hypothesis that Christians hold less environmentalist attitudes than their peers in other religious traditions, the direct experience effect, and the Reverence Hypothesis, this dissertation includes descriptive analysis, psychometric scale evaluations, OLS regression, and multilevel modeling of data from the pooled World Values Survey/European Values Survey. Findings are mixed on the Dominion Hypothesis, but consistently support the Direct Experience and Reverence Hypotheses.
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Calvert, Arran James. "Living with Durham Cathedral : understanding the dynamic relationships between a community and their cathedral." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/12034.
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Cathedrals today are no longer sites of just religious worship, they must be many things to many people such as tourist attractions, heritage centres, and meeting places. Today, Durham Cathedral in the north-east of England is home to almost 900 people engaged on site, of which almost 700 are volunteers. Add to that number over 700,000 visitors and about 1,700 religious services annually, and a complex image of life within Durham Cathedral begins to take shape. Drawing on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork between August 2013 and September 2014, this thesis takes a phenomenological approach in exploring the dynamic relationships that exist between a 900-year-old building and those who regularly come into contact with that building. It will consider the complex negotiations that take place between the many parts of the community and the building in a constantly changing environment, and will focus on the role sound, light, time, and space play in the constant challenge of change and negotiation. Finally, it will consider how buildings are not only constructed but are also cultivated through being built and rebuilt, spaces negotiated and improvised, as well as filled with stories and memories. The importance of this research is not just in observing and understanding the types of change and negotiation that occur between a building and those who inhabit it, but also in understanding the altering roles of religious buildings as they cope with the changing demands of running a site of both historical and continuing social, religious, and financial pressures, Durham Cathedral is a place that gives space to differing communities, allowing people to find in the building what they need from the building and as a result of this, Durham Cathedral is not a place in which life happens, it is a place with which life happens.
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Gérard, Mamoudou. "Sports et changements socio-culturels au Bénin : cas du Borgou." Grenoble 1, 1996. http://www.theses.fr/1996GRE10279.
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Ce travail pose le probleme de l'integration d'une forme specifique de pratique physique occidentale, le sport de competition, dans un pays africain (le benin) ancienne colonie francaise. La question centrale vise les roles et les significations du sport moderne (a travers sa dimension sport de performance) dans une region ou persistent encore les pesanteurs sociologiques des societes mi-traditionnelles mi-modernes africaines. Le sport moderne semble se developper comme un corps etranger dans une societe ou l'insertion dans le groupe et la logique de l'informel sont fortement cultivees. A travers sa diffusion, la logique sportive releve de l'action d'une minorite (une elite). Cette logique s'impose au detriment des pratiques traditionnelles corporelles. Ce travail met egalement en exergue l'opposition entre les regions du pays. Les effets de regulation face aux usages sociaux du corps, parfois convergents, aprfois contradictoires avec les religions: islam, christianisme et animisme
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Williams, Tiffany M. "Race, Religion, and Environmental Concern Among Black and White Americans." The Ohio State University, 2020. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1595544208933244.
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Somaratne, Indika. "The role of religion and environmental ethics in climate change." Doctoral thesis, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Kultur-, Sozial- und Bildungswissenschaftliche Fakultät, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.18452/17763.
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Die meisten Menschen denken, dass Klimawandel und Nachhaltigkeit wichtige Herausforderungen darstellen. Allerdings legen zu wenige Weltbürger mit hohem treibhausgasproduzierenden Verhalten nicht in ausreichendem Maße auch ein treibhausgasverringerndes Verhalten an den Tag, um den Anstieg von Treibhausgasen und anderen Umweltproblemen aufzufangen. Warum ist das so? Strukturelle Barrieren, wie. z. B. eine klimaschädliche Infrastruktur, sind ein Teil der Antwort, aber auch psychologische Barrieren verhindern ein Verhalten, das Mitigation, Anpassung und ein nachhaltiges Umweltmanagement ermöglicht. Aber wer kann die psychologischen und ethischen Barrieren entfernen, um ein umweltfreundliches Verhalten zu etablieren? Die aktuellen Institutionen dieser Welt haben es nicht geschafft, die Bedrohung durch den Klimawandel adäquat zu adressieren. Keiner der Politiker war bisher dazu bereit, das kurzfristige ökonomische Wohl seines Landes zu opfern, auch wenn sie gleichzeitig einsehen, dass Nachhaltigkeit auf lange Sicht unabdingbar ist. Die Umweltkrise ist nicht einfach nur ein technologisches Problem (wie es von einigen Industrieländern definiert wird). Probleme entstehen auch nicht, weil unsere Technologie nicht genügend Nahrungsressourcen zur Verfügung stellen kann und auch nicht, weil wir nicht in der Lage sind, fortschrittlichere Technologien zu erfinden, um den Giftmüll, den wir produzieren, herauszufiltern. Das Wesen der modernen Umweltkrise dreht sich um die moderne Zivilisation und die Werte, die ihr zugrunde liegen. „Unsere ökologische Krise ist das zwangsläufige Ergebnis des Mangels an Sensibilität der modernen Wirtschaft gegenüber der Verletzlichkeit und der Grenzen der Natur, des verrückten Machtkampfes der modernen Politik, des weltweiten Verhaltens der Völker, Glück mit materieller Befriedigung gleichzusetzen, und deren überwältigenden Akzeptanz einer mechanischen und dualistischen Sichtweise der Natur.“Most people think Climate Change and sustainability are important problems, but too few global citizens engaged in high-greenhouse-gas-emitting behaviour are engaged in sufficient mitigating behaviour to stem the increasing flow of greenhouse gases and other environmental problems. Why is that? Structural barriers such as a climate-averse infrastructure are part of the answer, but psychological barriers also impede behavioural choices that would facilitate mitigation, adaptation and environmental sustainability. But who can remove the psychological and ethical barriers to pro-environmental actions? The world''s present institutions have failed to address adequately the threat of Climate Change. No politician has been willing to sacrifice the short-term economic welfare of his or her country, even while agreeing that sustainability is essential in the long term. The environmental crisis is not simply an issue of technology (as defined by some developed countries). It is neither because our technology cannot provide enough resources for us to consume, nor because we cannot invent more advanced technology to refine the toxic wastes we produce that environmental problems arise. The essence of the modern environmental crisis is about modern civilization and its underlying values. “Our ecological crisis is the inevitable outcome of the modern economy’s insensitivity to the vulnerability and limits of nature, the mad power struggle of modern politics, modern people’s universally equating happiness with material satisfaction, and their overwhelming acceptance of a mechanical and dualist view of nature.”
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Dutcher, Katherine M. ""The Earth Nourishing Itself": Bodies and Theology in American Food Production Systems." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2009. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/pomona_theses/36.
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The industrial food production system is a head-on collision of ecology, morality, and human health, and their respective bodies of earth, animal and human. This thesis is an attempt to grapple with that damage from a theological perspective. What would it mean for a theology to answer to the degradation of American soil that sustains nothing but oil-drenched monoculture? to the horrifying conditions under which we as a nation raise, feed, and slaughter the animals for our consumption? to the dizzying array of food-related diseases that now affect our country in staggering frequency, particularly among lower socioeconomic classes? And what would that theology look like in the real world? The first chapter of this thesis surveys the damage done to earth, animal and human bodies by the industrial food system. A discussion of corn, the backbone of the entire system, and its effects on the land leads into a discussion of corn-fed animals and the conditions under which they live. In the final section, some of the health effects directly traceable to eating industrial food are overviewed. The second chapter highlights and examines three groups of people who, often for theological reasons, are growing food in alternative ways: ways that not only do not harm bodies, but sustain them and help them to thrive. The third chapter is a set of theological reflections on the first two, in which I try to pin down some essential theological differences between the first two chapters, and bring in theologians who are helpful in this enterprise. The four theological points I discuss are taking bodies seriously, a panentheistic approach to the world, interrelatedness and the presence of complexity, and mutuality and relational power.
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Moret, Erica. "Afro-Cuban religion, diaspora ethnobotany and environmental change in post-Soviet Cuba." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2007. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.445755.
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Lalonde, Roxanne L. "Environmental attitudes and religious beliefs, a comparative examination." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1998. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/tape17/PQDD_0022/NQ34794.pdf.
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Kirby, Jeffrey. "Religion and spirituality within environmental communities : place and significance in the UK context." Thesis, University of Leeds, 2014. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/7482/.
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This study examines religion and spirituality within environmental communities in the UK. Through the detailed study of three communities, 35 in-depth interviews and ethnographic observations, the substantive forms of religion and spirituality present are for the first time comprehensively documented. Individual beliefs and practices are examined alongside shared religious traditions, collective rituals and shrines within communal spaces. The place of religion and spirituality is mapped within communities using the concept of four realms (Inner, Personal, Social and Public). A comparative approach is employed to explore the differences between urban and rural contexts. Two strong community discourses involving religion and spirituality within the rural context, hitherto not commented upon, are examined in detail. The first relates to differences in strategic tendency (spiky-fluffy), these are in fact found to emanate from the previous Environmental Direct Action (EDA) movement. The second centres upon the Art of Mentoring Movement in which a number of community members had participated. Through detailed analysis the study describes how this organisation differed from the other spiritual traditions being practiced within the rural environmental communities. Throughout the study I suggest that many of the prominent features of environmental communities are similar to those identified in the EDA movement UK and Western countercultural movements of the 1960s. It is in regard to these social movements that I posit New Social Movement theories in particular help explain the presence of multiple ideologies within all three communities. Towards the end of the study I analyse the functional traits of religion and spirituality. All aspects of community bonding are considered including ideology, cultural practices, normative practices and body experiences. It is within the latter category that I suggest a type of ‘organic embodied solidarity’ exists within the rural context.
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Menning, Nancy Lee. "Reading nature religiously: Lectio Divina, environmental ethics, and the literary nonfiction of Terry Tempest Williams." Diss., University of Iowa, 2010. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/556.
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This dissertation describes a method for constructing a religious environmental ethic modeled on the spiritual practice of lectio divina, or devotional reading. Lectio divina is an explicitly religious way of reading, distinguished from other modes of reading not by what is read--even sacred scriptures can be read for mastery of content, for entertainment, etc.--but by how it is read. In lectio divina, the reader engages the text with a willingness to be transformed by an encounter with the sacred, mediated somehow by the text. This vulnerability is inherent in a religious reading, as is the intimacy implicit in the repeated engagement with the text that is central to the practice of lectio divina. The emphasis on vulnerability and intimacy marks this religious approach to environmental ethics as a form of virtue ethics.
Consistent with the traditional insight conveyed by the two-books metaphor, whereby Christians believed God was revealed both in the Book of Scripture and the Book of Nature, I map the classic stages of lectio divina onto a reading not of scripture but of the natural world. Paying attention requires careful observation, the naming and description of relevant details, and awareness and articulation of emotional responses as one repeatedly visits natural settings. Pondering requires a willingness to enter deeply into the religious, scientific, and other sources that help us understand the natural world and our place within it, as well as a willingness to reflect critically upon those sources. Responding calls upon readers of nature to take definite actions that flow out of the previous stages of paying attention and pondering, utilizing knowledge born of familiarity to address environmental challenges while also protecting natural settings in which the unnamable sacred can be encountered. Surrendering involves acknowledging human limits of understanding, will, and action, and nonetheless finding rest and restoration by trusting in some force beyond the merely human. I illustrate this argument with interpretations of literary works by Terry Tempest Williams, thereby asserting the relevance of religiosity to human transformation and to efforts to imaginatively embody human-land relationships that further human and ecological flourishing.
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Field, David Nugent. "Reformed theology, modernity and the environment crisis." Doctoral thesis, University of Cape Town, 1996. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/17490.
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Bibliography: p. 307-341.The prospect of global ecological disaster fundamental challenge to modernity as the poses a dominant contemporary socio-cultural matrix. This challenge can only be responded to through a radical socio-cultural transformation which favours those, human and otherkind, who have been marginalised and oppressed by modernity. This will include a change of human consciousness, and. the development of an alternative vision of society in which all humans live in community with each other and with otherkind. It thus has a profoundly religious character. The thesis argues that the central truth claims of the Christian gospel, particularly as they have been understood in the Reformed tradition, require the church to commit itself to working for such a socio-cultural transformation. However, the Reformed tradition can only contribute to this transformation once it is recognised that it has been deeply intertwined with modernity since its emergence, and has contributed to the legitimation of a culture which has degraded the environment. The thesis provides a self-critical exposition of the tradition in the light of the environmental crisis; in dialogue with other Christian traditions, and making use of insights from contemporary biblical scholarship. First, the socio-historical relationship between the Reformed tradition and the rise of modernity is examined. It is argued that, under particular social and economic conditions, the influence of the Reformed tradition accelerated the emergence of modernity. In this interaction with early modernity important components of the tradition were suppressed. Second, the tradition is re-examined to develop a Reformed ecotheology centred on the motifs of the Trinity, the covenant and the glory of God. This ecotheology makes a critical use of the theologies of important figures in the Reformed tradition, including John Calvin, Jonathan Edwards, Abraham Kuyper and Karl Barth. Third, a proposal is developed as to how this ecotheology can contribute to socio-cultural transformation. It does so by using insights gained from the role played by the South African church in the struggle against Apartheid. It argues that the environmental crisis ought to be understood as a kairos for the earth which must lead to a new way of being the church in the contemporary world.
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Kim, Ye Jung. "Hierarchy Attenuating/Enhancing Organizational Environments and Intergroup Attitudes: Relationship of Racism, Classism, and Sexism in Multiracial and Monoracial Churches of the United States." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2005. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc4956/.
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As Yancey (2003) has pointed out, the intentional character of racially integrated churches tends to lessen the social distance between Whites and minorities. The purpose of this study is to examine how racially hierarchy-attenuating and hierarchy-enhancing environments affect classism and sexism attitudes among congregations. The finding shows that multiracial churches promote H-A environment for class and race diversity, but not for gender equality. The class and race diversity is affected by organizational structure; on the other hand, gender equality is influenced by theologies. This study finds the answers to this discrepancy from the effect of biblical teachings on classist and sexist attitudes and the cumulative effect of structured domination of women.