Agrarian Spirit: Cultivating Faith, Community, and the Land

Abstract

dramaturgical production. His elaboration of embodied spiritualities related to outdoor recreation bears additional scholarly analysis (as he suggests). He focuses specifically on surfing, but there are resources that highlight (although not in the depth that LeVasseur does here) the religious cultural production stemming from other activities such as skiing, rock climbing, kayaking, and hiking. There are few ethnographies, unfortunately, about these embodied modes of spirituality. Two case studies of post-Anthropocene dramaturgies which combine environmentalism, sex, and gender include the advocacy group “FuckForForest” (FFF) and the emergence of people who self-identify as EcoSexuals. For some scholars of religions these are described as new modes of performance and identification. LeVasseur suggests that these are instantiations of dark green religious production at the cultural margins. Yet will they stay marginal as the impact of climate disruption persists and worsens? “The challenge to the academy, and especially religious studies”, LeVasseur argues, “is to see how studies such as these can possibly, or will actually contribute to resilient transformations, if at all” (136). Towards the end of his introduction, LeVasseur asks his reader to consider the following questions: “How do we bring beauty to the academy? How do we ask questions appropriate to the Anthropocene, so we can better understand how human animals are trying to protect such beauty, or are seeking to rediscover it? How can we help create institutions where knowledge of and ceremony with beauty are their reason for being?” (xxx). Indeed, as he artfully articulates, we have not yet developed an academic culture that can even reflect on how something like beauty, imagined as a harmonious embodied interbeing of material and non-material agents, might be codified, sought after, and studied. Climate Change, Religion, and Our Bodily Future provides the first steps towards an academy that might be able to ask and answer such poignant questions.