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Call for Contributions to Ecozon@
Special Focus, Autumn 2011 Issue:

“Ecospirit: Religion and the Environment”

Guest Editor: Franca Bellarsi, Université Libre de Bruxelles

 From time immemorial, Nature and the sacred have been deeply
intertwined, be it in animist and pantheist beliefs, in the Christian
view that the “Book of Nature” complements the Holy Scriptures, or in
Far-Eastern philosophies of compassionate non-duality seeing the
divide between S/self and O/other as illusory.  Only relatively
recently in human history has the link between Nature and piety been
weakened by the development of post-agrarian, global, and consumerist-
driven economies.  Not even the advent of Western-style empirical
science has resulted in a complete severance of the connection
between mysticism and enquiry into Nature: Francis Bacon and his
heirs may have transformed the Earth into a feminized and exploitable
“subaltern”; but conversely, humans have also been awed by the
natural sciences and the glimpse they offer into the patterns of
creativity and communication of natural systems whose complexity
continues to surpass our understanding.  As rightly pointed out by
specialists of “nature spirituality” like Bron Taylor, eco-biological
models like James Lovelock’s Gaia theory have also given rise to new
non-theistic, postmodern “ecopieties” (see Dark Green Religion, 2010,
13-41).  Thus, to borrow Taylor’s terminology, whether one talks of
the current “greening” of institutional world religions or of the
emergent forms of “dark green” spirituality directly grounded in
environmental awareness (Dark Green Religion 12), the non-human realm
of creation, its primacy, mysteries, and elusive “language” continue
to inspire spiritualities old and new worldwide.

Yet the multiple ambiguities inherent in both personal and
institutional religion mean that there is no consensus amongst
ecocritics when it comes to the “green sacred.”  One part of the
ecocritical community considers reverencing and worshipping Nature in
some degree a prerequisite for developing the humility needed to
challenge our anthropocentric exploitation of the non-human “Other.”
By contrast, though, others are wary of the oppressive ideologies
associated with mysticism at large, ideologies often seen as
complicit with the very forces subjecting both human and non-human
life (patriarchy, for instance).  Moreover, whilst some ecocritics
view holistic models of Nature as the best way to reconnect humanity
with the natural world, others doubt their ecological accuracy from a
scientific point of view, or question their potential to enable us to
overcome the more naïve legacies of pastoralism and Romanticism.
Further still, some see the misanthropic millennialism linked to
certain versions of environmental mysticism as incompatible with
environmental justice, if not downright ecofascist. Last but not
least, it is not just due to the different status of wilderness on
the American and European continents, but also due to the different
unfolding of religion in their respective pasts and cultures, that
ecocritical sensibilities “made in Europe” diverge from those “made
in the USA.”

For the Autumn 2011 Special Focus section, we welcome submissions
spanning disciplines from religious studies to the arts and
literature.  We would, for instance, be particularly interested in
papers

•       theorizing the “greening” of Abrahamic religions on the European
continent;

•       theorizing the emergence of alternative “dark green” spiritualities
in Europe;

•       addressing the ecospiritual concerns of non-Abrahamic and minority
religious practices in Europe (e.g. European Buddhism and Paganism);

•       discussing the links between ecospirituality and the effort to
develop non-patriarchal theologies;

•       discussing ecofeminist spiritualities

•       discussing the links between ecospirituality and the hard sciences;

•       investigating how ecospirituality might (not) be reconciled with
the heritage of the Enlightenment;

•       documenting the role played by “ecospirit” in European
environmentalism and radical environmental activism in Europe;

•       engaging with how ecospiritualities and the “greening” of
traditional creeds has been translated in the contemporary arts and
literatures of Europe;

•       reflecting on the possible role of the “ecospiritual” in
environmental pedagogy;

•       dealing with “ecospirit” from the vantage point of theolinguistics;

•       approaching the topic of “ecospirit” from a comparative
perspective, bringing into dialogue different religious and cultural
traditions in Europe;

•       comparing and contrasting the various manifestations of “dark
green” and “greening” spiritualities in Europe and other parts of the
world (North America, Asia, …);

•       comparing and contrasting the orientations of European ecocriticism
and other ecocritical communities worldwide in their engagement with
ecospiritualities.

We welcome original submissions in either French, English, or
German.  Submissions should be peer-review-ready in the form of
academic papers with a limit of 6,000 words, together with a 300 word
(maximum) abstract both in Spanish and English.  Besides scholarly
papers, publication of a limited number of creative contributions is
also planned.

Contributions must be submitted online for peer review, following the
submission guidelines (free submission) from the website:
<www.ecozona.eu>. Every submission must follow the MLA format and the
author is responsible for securing copyright on all materials
included in the paper such as images, quotations, etc. THE DEADLINE
FOR SUBMISSION OF ARTICLES IS  MARCH 15, 2011

Interested scholars are welcome to write in the first instance to the
Guest-Editor at [log in to unmask], enclosing a short preliminary
abstract.