If our optimal role as humans is to be creative participants within cosmological processes, how can the world’s religions foster that role? The religions have been challenged over the last several centuries by major revolutions in the understanding of the role of humans in relation to science, politics, economics and society. Some may see the ecological revolution as just another step in these significant movements in human history and consciousness. However, we might observe that this is more than simply a slight shift of perspective. It is rather a major transformation that involves both effort and evocation. It requires a comprehensive re-visioning of what it is to be human on a finite planet amidst infinite immensities. We see ourselves now not simply as political, economic or social beings but as planetary beings within a vast evolutionary universe and now have a responsibility in some way for the integrity and stability of these life processes.

It is clear that religions have historically served as a means of channeling the hopes and aspirations of humans toward a larger vision of their place and purpose. Now religions are challenged to provide a more comprehensive narrative perspective for situating human life in relation to our finite planet. The renewing energies that ground and dynamize the human spirit must be brought forward. For millennia, these energies have provided the spiritual orientations of the world’s civilizations and cultures. Religions have traditionally been a means of expanding the measure of the mind through the power of the religious imagination; now is the moment for the religions to move forward boldly with comprehensive narrative perspectives that are grounded in relevant traditional resources, open to a sense of wonder, and guided by inspiring moral visions for shaping human-Earth relations for a sustainable future.

In this spirit, the religions of the world are moving into their ecological phase and finding their planetary expression. This is their fundamental challenge in relation to the environmental crisis. Can religious traditions awaken a renewed sense of awe and reverence for the Earth as a numinous matrix of mystery? Can they activate the depths of resonance in the human that will resound with the awesome beauty of the universe? Can they open a space for our participation in the life processes tat is healing and renewing for human-Earth relations? Can they raise key ethical questions regarding the destruction of the environment, and at the same time provide resources of inspiration that will sustain the energies needed to preserve, protect and restore the environment? Can the religious traditions speak effectively to the contemporary world while challenging the limits of modernity as well?

These are their challenges—and indeed everyone’s challenges—as we begin to take on our cosmological being, to dwell in intimate immensities. We are cracking open the shell of our anthropocentric selves and our particular religious traditions to move toward more expansive religions sensibilities that embrace both Earth and universe. New configurations of tradition and modernity will emerge, and with them will come retrieval of texts, construction of theologies, renewal of symbols and rituals, reevaluation of ethics, and most, importantly, a revivified sense of wonder and celebration.

Excerpted from Religion East & West, Issue 2

Mary Evelyn Tucker is an Adjunct Professor, Senior Lecturer and Senior Scholar at Yale University, with joint appointments in the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, the Divinity School and the Department of Religious Studies. Professor Tucker is co-founder and co-director, with John Grim, of the Forum on Religion and Ecology, directing a series of twelve conferences, “Religions of the World and Ecology,” at Harvard’s Center for the Study of World Religions. She is the author of Moral and Spiritual Cultivation in Japanese Confucianism and has coedited a series of works on ecology and religion, including Worldviews and Ecology with John Grim, Buddhism and Ecology with Duncan Williams, Confucianism and Ecology: The Interrelation of Heaven, Earth, and Humans with John Berthrong, and Hinduism and Ecology with Christopher Key Chapple. She received her PhD from Columbia University in the history of religions, specializing in Confucianism in Japan.

Religion East & West is published by the Institute for World Religions, a branch of Dharma Realm Buddhist University. The annual journal furthers the Institute’s mission of promoting knowledge about the world’s religions through the medium of interfaith understanding and trust. Religion East & West highlights the annual Venerable Master Hua Memorial Lecture.

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