What if Religions had Ecologies? The Case for Reinhabiting Religious Studies

Abstract

Meaningful connections need to be forged between the literary realm of ecocriticism and religious studies, and more attention needs to be paid to the natural history of the physical environments that religious communities inhabit and to how those communities shape and are in turn shaped by those environments. When physical environments are considered as integral parts of academic religious inquiry and no longer rendered invisible or relegated to mere ‘backdrops’ for the larger human drama, scholars will be able to provide a more nuanced sense of religion as it is truly lived in context.