What is religion? In a course like this, where we're trying to examine religions and ecology, we want to invite you in to also examine the nature of religion, which of course is diverse and complex. The word itself is often brought back to a Latin word called "religio," which means to bind back, to reconnect. What are we reconnecting to? Well in the West, certainly to a god, a transcendent god, someone beyond this world. But in Asia, there's other ways of binding back. It could be to the Dao, that which flows through nature, it could be a heavenly sense of direction to the whole universe, as in Confucianism. The Buddhists don't actually have a sense of God, and so it's much more the interdependent, together rising up of things. But nonetheless, around the world we have cultures and religious expressions of those cultures that are yearning for the human to be bound into meaning, into a sense of grounding in the purpose of their lives. This became very clear to me when they went to Japan and I was just 21, and all of a sudden I realized most of the rest of the world looked at religion very differently. Buddhism and Confucianism and Daoism and Hinduism and Shinto had a whole different sense of what it meant to be religious. As well, as I began to study religion in graduate school, I realized these are traditions that are thousands of years old. They have scriptures, but they also have commentaries on those scriptures and they have all kinds of changes in their beliefs and their practices, even in their ethics over time. So part of this class is an invitation into the changing and diverse nature of religion. And to say that just as they've changed over time, religions too are trying to meet the environmental challenge and open up their teachings, their scriptures, their ethical practices to say: how can we meet the environmental challenges? What will environmental ethics look like, new human-earth relations emerging that draw on the traditions and yet reconstruct them for our times. That's the challenge of religions throughout history. They've been changing and adapting and meeting modern circumstances. One other consideration here is many people like to say, "I'm spiritual but not religious," and that's certainly an important position. But we can also say religions have within them deep spiritual roots and practices. In Christianity, for example, the Franciscan tradition, inspired by Saint Francis, had this sense of Brother Sun, Sister Moon, of the collection of species and cosmic relationships in which humans were placed. So, a Franciscan spirituality already has a nature spirituality in it. The same in Buddhism. I was keenly interested in Zen Buddhism when I went to Japan and did a lot of Zen meditative practices. And that tradition too has a very close relationship in the gardens to help people meditate and see nature in the pine trees, in the rocks, in the water, in the moss, how we relate to and feel part of that, that's a Zen spirituality, if you will. So the invitation here is to explore the richness of the world's religions, to see their spiritual practices and their new ethical forms emerging. You don't necessarily need background in the study of world religions to come into a class like this. We'll show you some background reading that will help you. But mostly it's an openness that we ask you to share with us in understanding and studying these religions, realizing that there's problems and there's promise, as John will speak about. But there's great potential here for a new ethical sensibility about human earth relations.
