Liberating People, Planet, and Religion: Intersections of Ecology, Economics, and Christianity

Too often, religious engagements with economy and ecology have placed emphasis on individual morality, action, and agency at the level of consumption patterns or have suggested mere modifications within existing economic paradigms. Contributors to a new volume — Liberating People, Planet, and Religion: Intersections of Ecology, Economics, and Christianity, which will be published in July 2024 (Roman and Littlefield) — call into question the adequacy of this approach in light of the urgency of climate change which is always ever entwined with ongoing patterns of exploitation, oppression, and colonialism in current economic systems. The basic intuition driving this volume is that while Christianity has by and large become the handmaiden of exploitative capitalism and empire, it might also reclaim latent theologies and religious practices that call into question the fundamental valuation of labor without recognition or rest, of extractive exploitation, and a “winner take all” praxis. The volume's editors, Joerg Rieger and Terra Schwerin Rowe, will discuss the conceptual framework of the volume and some of the key insights it gathers.