A Greener Faith: Religious Environmentalism and Our Planet's Future. By Roger S. Gottlieb

Abstract

Roger Gottlieb's latest contribution to the growing literature on religion and environment opens with the sounds of a new start. It is not uncommon to hear that an environmental crisis challenges humanity to rethink its fundamental sense of identity and respond in new ways, nor that religions may possess resources to help us do that. But Gottlieb announces that this rethinking and responding is in fact already happening, and is doing so within a diverse religious scene, where practical responses and cultural innovations are emerging. Whatever its contribution to underlying causes or crises may have been, says Gottlieb, religion is becoming a source of good environmental news, a place to look for emergent forms of human identity in an environmental age. A Greener Faith therefore makes religious environmentalism of importance not only to pragmatic environmentalists and political observers but to religionists, for it signals that religious communities, pressed by a new kind of social challenge, have begun adapting and redeploying their traditions to offer meaningful responses. More importantly, Gottlieb claims that these responses are part of a groundswell phenomenon that is reshaping politics and culture in religious dimensions: “[r]eligious environmentalism is a diverse, vibrant, global movement, a rich source of new ideas, institutional commitment, political activism, and spiritual inspiration” (215).