Understanding Climate Change through Religious Lifeworlds

"These ethnographies each offer a wealth of information on particular religious encounters with a changing climate, and collecting them here makes clear the complexity and importance of comparative work on religion and climate change. Anyone who wants to understand the ways people are making spiritual and moral sense of climate change should read this book."—Kevin J. O'Brien, Pacific Lutheran University, author of The Violence of Climate Change

"These ethnographically rich case studies located in the Global South show with sensitivity and insight what it means to worship and believe at the forefront of the climate crisis. Through careful attention to local religious worlds in the Andes, Oceania, the Himalaya and beyond, this ground-breaking book makes clear that other dimensions in addition to science, such as the mythological, ritual, and emotional, must be included in negotiations and initiatives around climate change."—Sarah M. Pike, author of For the Wild: Ritual and Commitment in Radical Eco-Activism

"This tour de force surveys the ethnography of the low and the high, specifically, Pacific Islands threatened with submersion and degraded beaches and coral reefs, and the very high glaciers of the Andes and the Himalayas under threat of a total meltdown. With methodological acuity, this august assemblage of anthropologists and religious studies scholars narrate how local inhabitants in ten very different places seek to make sense of a world increasingly troubled by anthropogenic climate change."—Christopher Key Chapple, Doshi Professor of Indic and Comparative Theology, Loyola Marymount University

"This informative book moves the field of religion and ecology in significant ways into dialogue with climate studies around the world. What the contributors present here is local knowledge that has global implications for our shared planetary future. Original, readable, and engaging, we trust it will be read widely!"—John Grim and Mary Evelyn Tucker, Co-directors, Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology

"Religions evolve but can they incorporate scientific understandings of climate change and promote effective responses to it? This volume adds important clues to this and other important questions about the relationships between religions, human behaviors, and environmental systems."—Bron Taylor, author of Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future & editor of the Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature.

"This anthology will be valuable for scholars interested in religion, climate communication, and Indigenous cultures. The book, or selected chapters from it, would be appropriate for upper-level undergraduate or graduate courses in anthropology, area studies, environmental studies, and religion."—Cybelle Shattuck - Western Michigan University, H-Environment