{"title":"Introduction to the Special Issue on Contemporary Pagan Ecospiritualities","authors":"Helen A Berger, Caroline Tully","doi":"10.1558/jsrnc.25917","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1558/jsrnc.25917","url":null,"abstract":".","PeriodicalId":43748,"journal":{"name":"Journal for the Study of Religion Nature and Culture","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135666743","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction to the Special Issue on Contemporary Pagan Ecospiritualities","authors":"Helen A Berger, Caroline Tully","doi":"10.1558/jsrnc.26757","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1558/jsrnc.26757","url":null,"abstract":".","PeriodicalId":43748,"journal":{"name":"Journal for the Study of Religion Nature and Culture","volume":"68 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135666760","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Ulía is the word for olive in the Salento area of Italy. Ulía is also the word meaning’ I’d like to/ love to’, in the local dialect. The linguistic assonances are only one of the many dimensions that link olive trees and humanity, past and future, nature and desire. Recently, Salento’s hundreds-years-old olive trees have been attacked by a disease called Xylella Fastidiosa. In this paper, I analyze the presence and role of both Pagan and non-Pagan ‘neo-animist’ political discourses oriented toward the cure, preservation, tutelage and guardianship of Salento’s olive trees under threat of felling and eradication.
{"title":"Ulía","authors":"Giovanna Parmigiani","doi":"10.1558/jsrnc.23603","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1558/jsrnc.23603","url":null,"abstract":"Ulía is the word for olive in the Salento area of Italy. Ulía is also the word meaning’ I’d like to/ love to’, in the local dialect. The linguistic assonances are only one of the many dimensions that link olive trees and humanity, past and future, nature and desire. Recently, Salento’s hundreds-years-old olive trees have been attacked by a disease called Xylella Fastidiosa. In this paper, I analyze the presence and role of both Pagan and non-Pagan ‘neo-animist’ political discourses oriented toward the cure, preservation, tutelage and guardianship of Salento’s olive trees under threat of felling and eradication.","PeriodicalId":43748,"journal":{"name":"Journal for the Study of Religion Nature and Culture","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135666899","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Contemporary Pagan nature sanctuaries across the United States feature practices such as ecosystem restoration, species preservation, and green burial. Pagans ritualize these practices in ways that both express and constitute reverential or intimate relations between humans, soil, plants, rocks, nonhuman animals, and spiritual beings. Their nature sanctuaries also express particular relationships with the more-than-human world through creating various kinds of sacred spaces, including shrines and altars. Because they are separated from most visitors’ daily lives, these sanctuaries work for many visitors as portals to a different state of consciousness in which human and nonhuman nature are experienced in powerful ways. This paper will explore the ritualized ways that environmentally conscious practices are promoted and engaged with at these sanctuaries. I will focus particularly on two sets of tensions: 1) leaving spaces wild and domesticating them and 2) natural burial and ecosystem restoration that brings species back to life. These varied practices reveal different ways of understanding ‘nature’ and ‘the wild’.
{"title":"‘There’s Divinity in Everything Here’","authors":"Sarah M Pike","doi":"10.1558/jsrnc.24316","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1558/jsrnc.24316","url":null,"abstract":"Contemporary Pagan nature sanctuaries across the United States feature practices such as ecosystem restoration, species preservation, and green burial. Pagans ritualize these practices in ways that both express and constitute reverential or intimate relations between humans, soil, plants, rocks, nonhuman animals, and spiritual beings. Their nature sanctuaries also express particular relationships with the more-than-human world through creating various kinds of sacred spaces, including shrines and altars. Because they are separated from most visitors’ daily lives, these sanctuaries work for many visitors as portals to a different state of consciousness in which human and nonhuman nature are experienced in powerful ways. This paper will explore the ritualized ways that environmentally conscious practices are promoted and engaged with at these sanctuaries. I will focus particularly on two sets of tensions: 1) leaving spaces wild and domesticating them and 2) natural burial and ecosystem restoration that brings species back to life. These varied practices reveal different ways of understanding ‘nature’ and ‘the wild’.","PeriodicalId":43748,"journal":{"name":"Journal for the Study of Religion Nature and Culture","volume":"40 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135668068","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens with Jennie Klein, Assuming the Ecosexual Position: The Earth as Lover (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021), 250 pp., $29.95 (pbk), ISBN 978-1-5179-0019-9.
{"title":"Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens with Jennie Klein, Assuming the Ecosexual Position: The Earth as Lover","authors":"Caroline Tully","doi":"10.1558/jsrnc.25171","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1558/jsrnc.25171","url":null,"abstract":"Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens with Jennie Klein, Assuming the Ecosexual Position: The Earth as Lover (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021), 250 pp., $29.95 (pbk), ISBN 978-1-5179-0019-9.","PeriodicalId":43748,"journal":{"name":"Journal for the Study of Religion Nature and Culture","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135728609","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Paganism is a construction that religionists and scholars alike define according to their understandings and purposes. Herein I seek to explode common understandings of Paganism, which assume it always involves beliefs and practices about putatively divine natural entities, beings, or forces, and to consider such phenomena more broadly, as a sensory and affective sensibility – and a perception that is often entirely naturalistic (e.g., scientific and agnostic if not avowedly atheistic) – about the proper place of humans in, and obligations to, nature. When understood in this way one can discern that a host of cultural creatives, including those orchestrating pageants and ritual-resembling ceremonies, artists of all sorts, curators of science museums, and even some developers of theme parks, have affinity with Pagan worldviews and values. By expanding the boundary of what many confine as Paganism it becomes possible to consider whether Paganism is more widespread, and growing more rapidly, than many perceive.
{"title":"Bounding Paganism","authors":"Bron Taylor","doi":"10.1558/jsrnc.24147","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1558/jsrnc.24147","url":null,"abstract":"Paganism is a construction that religionists and scholars alike define according to their understandings and purposes. Herein I seek to explode common understandings of Paganism, which assume it always involves beliefs and practices about putatively divine natural entities, beings, or forces, and to consider such phenomena more broadly, as a sensory and affective sensibility – and a perception that is often entirely naturalistic (e.g., scientific and agnostic if not avowedly atheistic) – about the proper place of humans in, and obligations to, nature. When understood in this way one can discern that a host of cultural creatives, including those orchestrating pageants and ritual-resembling ceremonies, artists of all sorts, curators of science museums, and even some developers of theme parks, have affinity with Pagan worldviews and values. By expanding the boundary of what many confine as Paganism it becomes possible to consider whether Paganism is more widespread, and growing more rapidly, than many perceive.","PeriodicalId":43748,"journal":{"name":"Journal for the Study of Religion Nature and Culture","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135729551","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Far-Right Pagans, like most other contemporary Pagans, view their spirituality as earth-based. They are concerned about the environment, however that concern is integrated with their politics of White Supremacy. Based on my research of their online discourse, I find that they use four major themes to frame the environmental crisis: (1) The embrace of human beings as part of the natural world and not above it. (2) The acceptance of natural laws as the basis of ethical behavior. (3) A focus on purity and (4) A view that immigration and more generally human population needs to be limited to protect the environment. All of these to a greater or less degree can be found as aspects of the larger environmental movement. They, however, take a particular twist within the extremist logic and agenda of the far-right that is used to justify their radical solutions.
{"title":"The Environmentalism of the Far-Right Pagans","authors":"Helen A Berger","doi":"10.1558/jsrnc.24203","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1558/jsrnc.24203","url":null,"abstract":"Far-Right Pagans, like most other contemporary Pagans, view their spirituality as earth-based. They are concerned about the environment, however that concern is integrated with their politics of White Supremacy. Based on my research of their online discourse, I find that they use four major themes to frame the environmental crisis: (1) The embrace of human beings as part of the natural world and not above it. (2) The acceptance of natural laws as the basis of ethical behavior. (3) A focus on purity and (4) A view that immigration and more generally human population needs to be limited to protect the environment. All of these to a greater or less degree can be found as aspects of the larger environmental movement. They, however, take a particular twist within the extremist logic and agenda of the far-right that is used to justify their radical solutions.","PeriodicalId":43748,"journal":{"name":"Journal for the Study of Religion Nature and Culture","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135729554","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Oberon Zell, GaeaGenesis: Conception and Birth of the Living Earth (A Love Story), (Cincinnati, OH: Left Hand Press, 2022), 436 pp., $35 (cloth), $25 (pbk), ISBN 979-8-9853204-4-2.
{"title":"Oberon Zell, GaeaGenesis: Conception and Birth of the Living Earth (A Love Story)","authors":"Michael York","doi":"10.1558/jsrnc.26628","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1558/jsrnc.26628","url":null,"abstract":"Oberon Zell, GaeaGenesis: Conception and Birth of the Living Earth (A Love Story), (Cincinnati, OH: Left Hand Press, 2022), 436 pp., $35 (cloth), $25 (pbk), ISBN 979-8-9853204-4-2.","PeriodicalId":43748,"journal":{"name":"Journal for the Study of Religion Nature and Culture","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135666751","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Kathryn Gin Lum, Heathen: Religion and Race in American History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022), 368 pp., $35 (hbk), ISBN: 9780674976771.
{"title":"Kathryn Gin Lum, Heathen: Religion and Race in American History","authors":"Michael York","doi":"10.1558/jsrnc.23864","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1558/jsrnc.23864","url":null,"abstract":"Kathryn Gin Lum, Heathen: Religion and Race in American History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022), 368 pp., $35 (hbk), ISBN: 9780674976771.","PeriodicalId":43748,"journal":{"name":"Journal for the Study of Religion Nature and Culture","volume":"69 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135778427","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Annual List of Reviewers","authors":"Amanda Nichols","doi":"10.1558/jsrnc.26732","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1558/jsrnc.26732","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43748,"journal":{"name":"Journal for the Study of Religion Nature and Culture","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135667687","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}