Connections Quarterly Spring 2016 - Environment | Page 21

among a wide range of denominations and
individuals, or as a textbook for a course on
religion and the environment. Reading it in
the first way, I focused on Jewish and Islamic
views, then on Eastern thought.

with the Abrahamic faiths, and then move
outward in a sort of Comparative Religions
approach. Another method might move
from personal statements, including prayers,
poems, meditations, to texts speaking from
a religious tradition, or alternate between
public and private views. One teacher may
wish to use a single section or a few among
the book’s seven: “How Have Traditional Religions Viewed Nature,” for example, followed
by “Transforming Tradition”; or compared
and contrasted with the sections on “Spiritual Deep Ecology” or “Ecofeminist Spirituality.” Or an interdisciplinary course could use
various readings to combine literature, ethics, religion, and history.

For example, I found Rabbi Daniel Schwartz
commenting on the Bible as “a story of a
people who cared about and knew intimately the land around them.” I began to think
more deeply about the meaning of Jewish
concepts with which I was only slightly acquainted: the Sukkot booth, the New Year of
the Trees, the prayers upon seeing a rainbow,
or a beautiful tree, the individual prayers for
each kind of food, and so forth. Schwartz
hopes that “our modern sophistication can
be married to our ancient intimacy,” moving us from “our discord with nature to an
informed harmony with this, God’s universe.”
From a Saudi professor I read that “the
Qur’an’s acknowledgement that human beings are not the only community to live in this
world – ‘there is not an animal in the earth, or
a flying creature…but they are peoples like
unto you’ – means that…these other creatures are beings, and like us, are worthy of
respect and protection.” O.P. Dwivedi, Indianborn Canadian scholar of Hinduism, agrees
that “the earth is not for human beings alone,
but for other creatures as well,” and says that
since “only God has sovereignty over all creatures…humanity cannot act as a viceroy of
God over the planet, nor assign degrees of
relative worth to other species.”

This Sacred Earth is fairly expensive as a class
text. It is available new from Amazon at between $45 and $49, on Kindle or in paperback. But considering that a good calculus
text runs $90 to $247, The American Pageant
weighs in at $144, and even the Norton Anthology of American Literature is $65, we have
to consider if it profits our students to get an
AP 5 in one of these subjects, but lose their
planet, if not their souls. l

Richard Barbieri, Ph.D., is developing
programs in mediation and conflict management for schools, while serving as a
community mediator and President of the
New England Association for Conflict
Resolution. In addition to Connections
Quarterly, he writes regularly for
Independent School, and has published
with ACResolutions and online at www.
mediate.com. You may contact him at
[e-mail].

The teacher who decides to teach using this
book, whether at a denominational or secular school, has a myriad of options, and needs
even more than usual planning time to build
a curriculum. One could, for example, start

CSEE Connections

Spring 2016

Page 19