REL 374 - Entanglement: Environment, Ethics, and Religion

This course weaves together interconnected discourses to interrogate the premise, and obligations, of interconnectedness - environmental and social - in this age of climate crisis. In The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh wonders how future generations will frame this period of “derangement” - our willful ignorance of human responsibility for, and “imaginative and cultural failure that lies at the heart of,” the climate crisis. What roles have religions played in conceptualizing the relationship between humans and the environment? We will explore a range of theoretical frameworks, from Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome, to Ian Hodder’s entanglements, to Buddhist discourses on interconnectedness and codependent origination, paticcasamuppada. We will focus on Buddhist discourses on the first noble truth, dukkha (dis-ease, unease, suffering), in light of solastalgia (“the lived experience of the desolation of a much-loved landscape,” coined by Glenn Albrecht) and related eco-anxiety. We will read the ecopoetics of Gary Snyder (Reed ‘51) as we imagine what the amelioration of suffering (social and environmental) might entail, and what the interdisciplinary study of religion might offer.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Prerequisite(s): Sophomore standing
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):

Evaluate data and/or sources.
Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.