Creating Religious Environmental Traditions

Chapter 4 charts the creation of green religious traditions and, more specifically, how activists borrow and adapt images, theological warrants, and ritual practices from their own traditions to craft new environmental ethics. They do so constrained not just by what is available in the toolkit, but also by how such borrowing and adapting might be perceived by potential constituencies. This chapter shows how being embedded in particular religious traditions and real and imaginary audiences shape the formation of the new culture of religious environmentalism. More specifically, this chapter describes three innovation strategies – mining the tradition, reframing the tradition, and bricolage – and identifies the institutional conditions and constraints that push REMOs to adopt one of these strategies.

Aesthetics · Art · Bricolage · Cognitive reframing · Craft · Environmental ethics · Environmentalism · Epistemology · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Visual arts · Law · Philosophy · Psychology · Religion, Ecology, and Ethics · Religion, Society, and Development · Religious Tourism and Spaces · Social Psychology