Ecologies of Grace

Abstract

Abstract Christianity struggles to show how living on earth matters for living with God. While people of faith increasingly seek practical ways to respond to the environmental crisis, theology has had difficulty contextualizing the crisis and interpreting the responses. This book presents a field-shaping introduction to Christian environmental ethics that offers resources for renewing theology. Observing how religious environmental practices often draw on concepts of grace, the book maps the way Christian environmental strategies draw from traditions of salvation as they engage the problems of environmental ethics. It then uses this new map to explore afresh the ecological dimensions of Christian theology. The book first shows how Christian ethics uniquely frames environmental issues, and then how those approaches both challenge and re-inhabit theological traditions. It identifies three major strategies for making environmental problems intelligible to Christian moral experience. Each one draws on a distinct pattern of grace as it adapts a secular approach to environmental ethics. The strategies of ecojustice, stewardship, and ecological spirituality make environments matter for Christian experience by drawing on patterns of sanctification, redemption, and deification. The book then confronts the problems of each of these strategies through critical reappraisals of Thomas Aquinas, Karl Barth, and Sergei Bulgakov.

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