Caring for Creation: An Ecumenical Approach to the Environmental Crisis

by Max Oelschlaeger and Professor Max Oelschlaeger

Book Overview

Many environmentalists believe that religion has been a major contributor to our ecological crisis, for Judeo-Christians have been taught that they have dominion over the earth and so do not consider themselves part of a biotic community. In this book a philosopher of environmental ethics acknowledges that religion may contribute to environmental problems but argues that religion can also play an important role in solving these problems--that religion...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0300066457
• ISBN13: 9780300066456
• Release Date: February 1996
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Length: 296 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

So far so good; God's not Dead, he's Green

I'm just starting the book. I'm starting it holding William Greider's The Soul of Capitalism as an important standard, Daniel Quinn's Ishmael, Matthew Fox's Original Blessing, and Jay Haley's Uncommon Therapy as basic points of reference. Eliot Chapple's The Biological Foundations of Individuality and Culture is another of my foundational books. Oelschlager is starting out by referring to the various forms of Judeo-Christian religions' responsibility for the ecological crisis. He is starting to argue that this focus is not the only possible view for this or any religious tradition, and that it is imperative to revise this perspective to address the question of sustainability because of the underlying nature of the religion in the culture. As Matthew Fox was ultimately forced to leave the Catholic Dominican order for his life-affirming revisions of Church Orthodoxy, I would suggest, Oelschlager is suggesting that such a new view of religion is necessary to guide the urgent changes in society. As Greider has explored the financial systems' control panel, and Haley describes the genius of Milton Erickson's psychotherapy, Oelschlager appears to be developing a philosophical analysis of religion's sociocultural functional role extending to the experiential political economy in all our lives, large, small, and personal. More on this later.