Religion, Environmental Crisis, Fascism

This essay argues for a certain normative conception of religion’s current re-sponsibilities. It is directive in intent, even though I realize that religious communities have their own deep sense of how their faiths should direct their lives. Yet, as Alasdair MacIntyre (1988) observed, a good deal of the history of any religion (indeed, of any of what he called “traditions”) is made up of extended disagreements about what that tradition should be. In that sense, not only my relation to the mild-mannered Reform Judaism in which I was raised but my deep connection to other religions makes a space for an argument about what I— and of course a large group whose positions inform my own— seek. 1 Whatever the effect