Abstract:

A wide-ranging, interdisciplinary, taboo-free inquiry is essential to engage the central question animating this new journal: What are the relationships among human beings, their diverse religions, and the earth’s living systems? Likewise, it is critical that we wrestle with the terms that constitute the journal’s title—religion, nature and culture—given their diverse and contested meanings. I argue that the proper approach for this new journal is to provide habitat for all reasoned scholarly debate surrounding these terms and the relationships among them. Illustrating this argument by focusing especially on the term religion, I maintain that it is much more important for this journal to entertain interesting hypotheses about people and their environments than it is to resolve disagreements about the precise meaning, analytical value, or boundaries of phenomena that would be understood as religion by some but not all observers.

Author: Bron Taylor