Handley, George B. “Laudato si’ and the Postsecularism of the Environmental Humanities.” Environmental Humanities 8, no. 2 (2016): 277-84. doi:10.1215/22011919-3664396.
The urgent point here is that a dismissal or willed ignorance of the continued relevance of religion and religious discourse to the quest of establishing an environmental ethos would be an utterly fatal mistake to make in the age of climate change. This is especially the case given the extraordinary developments in religiously motivated environmentalism in recent decades, the apogee of which may very well be the Pope Francis’s Laudato si’. While environmental humanists in fields such as anthropology, philosophy, and religious studies are increasingly eager to engage the revelance of religious belief, ecocritics lag behind. Waiting for beliefs we deem problematic to go away before we can solve climate change—and I mean in particular religious and conservative beliefs assumed to make action on climate change more difficult—is certainly no simpler nor easier than trying to get rid of climate change.
© George B. Handley 2016. Environmental Humanities is available online only and is published under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
- Francis. Encyclical Letter Laudato Si’ of the Holy Father Francis on Care for our Common Home. Rome: Vatican Press, 2015.