Inhabitance: Ecological Religious Education

Abstract

I approached Jennifer Ayers’s book Inhabitance with a mixture of curiosity and resistance. I am not a religious educator but have for 10 years taught classes focused on environmental sustainability, which is one of the themes of Ayers’s impassioned, idealistic, but also deeply learned and surprisingly persuasive book. I figured I may be able to learn from her arguments, but I was prepared to categorize them as irrelevant to the pedagogies of my field. As it turned out, I was mostly right about the first, but mostly wrong about the second. Ayers’s arguments revolve around the importance of teaching proper “inhabitation”—that is, how to best recognize ourselves as embodied inhabitants of God’s creation, and how to allow that recognition to lead us to a greater stewardship of the relationship all human beings have both with and through the natural world. This recognition, she believes, is an imperative task: “Despite years of effort in ecclesial, educational, and public policy spheres in the United States, we remain, collectively, destructive inhabitants” (p. 3) of the world. Given that the mounting costs associated with climate change, watershed pollution, resource depletion, deforestation, and more only prove her right, Ayers’s determination to propose something entirely new is certainly justified. Ayers claims that the education in inhabitance which we need requires moving away from the classroom tropes of environmental education: abstract facts about natural patterns and cycles do not connect us with nature, nor build our affection for it. Ayers lays out her aspirations toward the end of the book’s first chapter: “While human beings might possess usable knowledge about their surroundings, this does not imply inhabitance . . . Cultivating [the] capacity for inhabitance, cultivating ecological faith . . . requires personal and social transformation at a level far deeper than that of figuring out ‘greener solutions’. It requires a reorientation of human identity and life so that human beings remember who they are” (pp. 17–18). Making the ideal of earthy, tactile, transformative cultivation central to her educational vision, Ayers develops a detailed theological and pedagogical context for the broad range of examples which form the heart of her book. International Journal of Christianity & Education