Ecopiety

Tackles a human problem we all share―the fate of the earth and our role in its future Confident that your personal good deeds of environmental virtue will save the earth? The stories we encounter about the environment in popular culture too often promote an imagined moral economy, assuring us that tiny acts of voluntary personal piety, such as recycling a coffee cup, or purchasing green consumer items, can offset our destructive habits. No need to make any fundamental structural changes. The trick is simply for the consumer to buy the right things and shop our way to a greener future. It’s time for a reality check. Ecopiety offers an absorbing examination of the intersections of environmental sensibilities, contemporary expressions of piety and devotion, and American popular culture. Ranging from portrayals of environmental sin and virtue such as the eco-pious depiction of Christian Grey in Fifty Shades of Grey, to the green capitalism found in the world of mobile-device “carbon sin-tracking” software applications, to the socially conscious vegetarian vampires in True Blood, the volume illuminates the work pop culture performs as both a mirror and an engine for the greening of American spiritual and ethical commitments. Taylor makes the case that it is not through a framework of grim duty or obligation, but through one of play and delight, that we may move environmental ideals into substantive action.

Comparative Political Theory and Cross-Cultural Philosophy: Essays in Honor of Hwa Yol Jung explores new forms of philosophizing in the age of globalization by challenging the conventional border between the East and the West, as well as the traditional boundaries among different academic disciplines. The essays in this volume examine diverse issues, encompassing globalization, cosmopolitanism, public philosophy, political ecology, ecocriticism, ethics of encounter, and aesthetics of caring. They examine the philosophical traditions of phenomenology of Hursserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Heidegger; the dialogism of Mikhail Bakhtin; the philosophy of mestizaje literature; and Asian philosophical traditions. This rich comparative and cross-cultural investigation of philosophy and political theory demonstrates the importance of cultural and cross-cultural understanding in our reading of philosophical texts, exploring how cross-cultural thinking transforms our understanding of the traditional philosophical paradigm and political theory. This volume honors the scholarship and philosophy of Hwa Yol Jung, who has been a pioneer in the field of comparative political theory, cross-cultural philosophy, and interdisciplinary scholarship. In one of his earliest publications, The Crisis of Political Understanding (1979), Jung described the urgency and necessity of breakthrough in political thinking as a crisis, and he followed up on this issue for his half century of scholarship by introducing Asian philosophy and political thought to Western scholarship, demonstrating the possibility of cross-cultural philosophical thinking. In his most recent publications, Jung refers to this possibility as 'transversality' or 'trans(uni)versality,' a concept which should replace the outmoded Eurocentric universality of modernist philosophy. Jung expounds that in 'transversality,' 'differences are negotiated and compromised rather than effaced and absorbed into sameness.' This volume is a testimony to the very possibility of transversality in our scholarship and thinking.

In Ecocritical Explorations, Patrick D. Murphy explores environmental literature and environmental cultural issues through both theoretical and applied criticism. He engages with the concepts of referentiality, simplicity, the nation state, and virtual reality in the first section of the book, and then goes on to interrogate these issues in contemporary environmental literature, both American and international. He concludes his argument with a discussion of the larger frames of family dynamics and un-natural disasters, such as hurricanes and global warming, ending with a chapter on the integration of scholarship and pedagogy in the classroom, with reference to his own teaching experiences. Murphy's study provides a wide ranging discussion of contemporary literature and cultural phenomena through the lens of ecological literary criticism, giving attention to both theoretical issues and applied critiques. In particular, he looks at popular literary genres, such as mystery and science fiction, as well as actual disasters and disaster scenarios. Ecocritical Explorations in Literary and Cultural Studies is a timely contribution to ecological literary criticism and an insightful look into how we represent our relationship with the environment.

What do world and regional religions say about economic morality? The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Economic Ethics presents together for the first time the key tenets and teachings of numerous faiths on this subject. In doing so, it also compares the major religions in their positions on various social, business, and policy topics, such as consumerism, competition, ecology, and feminism. It concludes with an analytical synthesis that presents and explains the patterns that emerge from the various religions and themes explored across the Handbook's chapters. Together, these chapters underscore a symbiosis between religion and economic life as they mutually enrich each other. On the one hand, religion improves the efficiency and efficacy of economic life by lowering the frictional and monitoring costs of market operations. Virtuous market participants internalize norms of good economic conduct and behave accordingly. On the other hand, socioeconomic life offers manifold enticements, comforts, and overindulgences that paradoxically push devout adherents to invest themselves even further in their beliefs. Socioeconomic life provides an opportunity for religions to build strong faith communities and for believers to reify their religion in their economic conduct. This Handbook presents the richness, nuances, and rationale of religions and their economic ethics. Readers will discover a remarkable convergence in religions' teachings on economic morality, despite their wide differences in dogma, ecclesial structures, and social practices. This confluence can be traced to similarities in the underlying anthropologies and cosmologies of these faiths. Finally, this Handbook shows, the major faiths share far more values than divide them, at least when it comes to economic morality.

Tackles a human problem we all share―the fate of the earth and our role in its future Confident that your personal good deeds of environmental virtue will save the earth? The stories we encounter about the environment in popular culture too often promote an imagined moral economy, assuring us that tiny acts of voluntary personal piety, such as recycling a coffee cup, or purchasing green consumer items, can offset our destructive habits. No need to make any fundamental structural changes. The trick is simply for the consumer to buy the right things and shop our way to a greener future. It’s time for a reality check. Ecopiety offers an absorbing examination of the intersections of environmental sensibilities, contemporary expressions of piety and devotion, and American popular culture. Ranging from portrayals of environmental sin and virtue such as the eco-pious depiction of Christian Grey in Fifty Shades of Grey, to the green capitalism found in the world of mobile-device “carbon sin-tracking” software applications, to the socially conscious vegetarian vampires in True Blood, the volume illuminates the work pop culture performs as both a mirror and an engine for the greening of American spiritual and ethical commitments. Taylor makes the case that it is not through a framework of grim duty or obligation, but through one of play and delight, that we may move environmental ideals into substantive action.

This innovative collection of essays draws together and compares the teachings of world and regional religions on the subject of economic morality.

This book invites readers to critically rethink the interrelations between geography and the law. Traditionally, legal-geographical interrelations have been dominated by scholars with backgrounds in geopolitics, economics, or geography. More recently, a new interdisciplinary approach has been developed with the aim of offering a fresh perspective on how law and geography intersect. There has been a steady growth in cross-disciplinary research in this field; how legal-geographical taxonomies interrelate has attracted attention from scholars and academics with a diverse range of backgrounds – namely, law, anthropology, and human/physical geography –, thus giving rise to several publications. Against this backdrop, the book adopts a legal comparative perspective and assesses ‘normative spatialities’, which are the outcomes of processes of legal-spatial production. In addition, the comparative analysis offers readers new insights on some traditional geographic features which are essential to legal studies (territorial identity, regional demarcation, territorial alternation, and place-name policy). Examples are drawn from several jurisdictions (both from the Global North and the Global South) and partly employ a diachronic perspective. As its subversive character is ideally suited to revealing policies and agendas, comparative law is used to identify the ethnocentric and colonial biases underpinning the use (and misuse) of legal geographic devices by policymakers and academics. In sum, the book presents legal geography as an interdisciplinary undertaking in which geographers and legal scholars can jointly examine common concepts in the historical, cultural, political and social contexts in which law is practised. The book transcends the boundaries between disciplines to engage in a fruitful dialogue on how the law can help to address the current socio-geographic and ecological crises.