Religion and Reconnecting with Nature

Abstract

Abstract Attention to the work of American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey and Native American novelist, poet, and essayist Leslie Silko reveals what are in many ways remarkably similar and complementary conceptualizations of religion, as both authors situate religion in the human’s experienced alienation from and reconnection with the natural world, draw heavily on Romantic motifs in literary art to convey the “religious” dynamics of these experiences, and suggest that readers who sincerely engage with certain literary works of art can come to share in these dynamics in a way that has the potential to help reorient their everyday relations with and attitudes toward the natural world. Reading Dewey alongside Silko thus offers us an interdisciplinary set of resources to articulate and promote an ecological conception of religion founded on a mutualistic-symbiotic mode of human dwelling on the earth.