Anna L. Peterson

In and Of the World? Christian Theological Anthropology and Environmental Ethics

Mainstream currents within Christianity havelong insisted that humans, among all creatures, areneither fully identified with their physical bodiesnor fully at home on earth. This essay outlines theparticular characteristics of Christian notions ofhuman nature and the implications of this separationfor environmental ethics. It then examines recentefforts to correct some damaging aspects oftraditional Christian understandings of humanitysplace in nature, especially the notions of physicalembodiment and human embeddedment in earth. Theprimary goal of the essay is not to offer acomprehensive evaluation of Christian thinking aboutnature but rather to identify theological anthropologyas a crucial dimension of, and problem for, Christianenvironmental ethics.

Climate Change and the Right to Hope

M ost people in the united states genuinely care about the environment, and yet collectively we are still filling landfills with plastic, guzzling gas, supporting factory farms, investing in unsustainable companies, and electing officials beholden to energy lobbies. Why do people so rarely act in ways consistent with their ethical commitments? As an environmental ethicist, I am especially interested in this gap between values and practices. Most people care about nature and about the prospects of future human generations. Most people also know that in order to make these prospects brighter, it is necessary, especially for Westerners, to reduce our collective consumption of resources, to restore ecosystems, and to live differently with nature and with each other. Holding values and knowing what they demand, however, does not seem to provoke the necessary behavioral changes.

Varieties of popular catholicism : A parish study

Just as Latin America is stereotyped as a “Catholic” continent, popular Catholicism in the region is stereotyped as a simple, monolithic set of practices and ideas. These images hide the tremendous diversity and also the tensions that characterize popular Catholicism in Latin America. This essay examines some of the varieties of popular Catholicism through the study of a single parish on the outskirts of San Salvador, El Salvador. It focuses on political and religious conflicts among different groups of laypeople, as well as disagreements between laypeople and pastoral agents, from the early 1970s to the present. It contends that throughout this period, popular Catholicism—in its “traditional” and also “progressive” manifestations—has been the site of intense contestation regarding theological ideas, pastoral approaches, and ethical-political praxis.

The Left and the Reign of God

This essay explores the resources that religious Utopianism, especially Christian visions of the reign of God, might offer to the project of reclaiming and revising a politically effective left Utopianism. It looks both at various efforts to revise and reclaim Utopian theory and imagery by left analysts today and at the historical experiences of a particular Utopian movement, the Catholic peasant left in Central America. It also critiques the unacknowledged Utopianism of self-proclaimed “realists” on the right. The article concludes with an affirmation of both the continuing significance of a critical Utopianism for left thinking and activism today, and the distinctive potential of religious Utopianism as a resource for both theory and practice.