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Mobilizing communities for environmental sustainability often involves engaging with religious values and beliefs, which can exert powerful influences on the attitudes, norms, and behaviors of the majority of people worldwide. Christianity is the largest world religion and, in some contexts, has also been among the most skeptical of climate and environmental concerns. A popular explanation for this skepticism focuses on eschatological views (i.e., end time beliefs) and posits that if the earth is going to be destroyed someday, there is little point in conserving it now. Empirical evidence is lacking, however, on the extent to which such beliefs actually influence environmental attitudes. We surveyed Christian undergraduate students in the US (N = 1520) and found that belief in the imminent return of Jesus Christ was not significantly associated with variables tested regarding biodiversity loss or climate change. Furthermore, a plurality responded that the earth will be renewed at the end (43%), not destroyed (24%), and beliefs about the fate of the earth were generally not related to attitudinal measures—except for a slim minority of respondents with strongest views that the earth will be destroyed—but were significantly associated with political ideology and literalist views of Scripture. These findings suggest that end time views may not be a major obstacle—at least among younger American Christians—to promoting socio-ecological sustainability.

Because sustainability ultimately rests on ethics, this groundbreaking book is a crucial link in extending sustainability from a mere intellectual exercise to a broader spectrum. Ethics of Sustainability develops a comprehensive ethical foundation for sustainability by bringing together nine ethical principles together in a cohesive manner to provide the badly needed ethical arguments that support this important concept. Each chapter is supported by case studies, exercises and other pedagogy, enabling technical professionals in various fields to understand the ethical foundations that apply to their needs.

Being Human examines the complex connections among conceptions of human nature, attitudes toward non-human nature, and ethics. Anna Peterson proposes an \"ethical anthropology\" that examines how ideas of nature and humanity are bound together in ways that shape the very foundations of cultures. Peterson discusses mainstream Western understandings of what it means to be human, as well as alternatives to these perspectives, and suggests that the construction of a compelling, coherent environmental ethics will revise our ideas not only about nature but also about what it means to be human.

Themes of Christian martyrdom were central to popular political mobilization in El Salvador, as in much of Latin America, during the 1970s and 1980s. The story of Christ's sacrifice provided a powerful narrative for explaining injustice and political violence, a frame for interpretation as well as action during the twelve-year Salvadoran civil war, which ended in 1992 by a negotiated settlement. In the first part of this article we trace the politics of martyrdom and sacrifice through the war. The final sections of the article examine the place of narratives of martyrdom and sacrifice in post-civil war El Salvador. While most Salvadorans today continue to experience high levels of inequality, poverty, and violence, the narratives of martyrdom and sacrifice that animated the revolutionary movements and liberation theology of the 1980s have lost much of their resonance. We suggest that the dispersion of both the perceived sources of, and the imagined solutions to, injustice contribute to the diminution in the importance of Christian narratives of martyrdom and sacrifice in El Salvador today. Adapted from the source document.

Environmental ethics has been dominated by an idealist logic that limits its positive impact on the natural world about which environmental philosophers care deeply. Environmental ethicists need to alter the ways we think and talk about what we value and the relations among ideas, values, and actions. Drawing on the sociology of religion and Marxian philosophy among other sources, a new approach may increase our understanding of how ideas are lived out and how we might increase the impact of our ideas about the value of nature.

Seeds of the Kingdom explores the utopian religious ethics practiced in Amish settlements in the United States Midwest and in former war zones in El Salvador. These communities stand as a counter-example to dominant trends not only in agriculture and economics, but also in political and religious culture. Residents organize their lives according to social ethics drawn from the Anabaptist and progressive Catholic streams within Western Christianity. Out of these traditions, they have developed a this-worldly Christian utopianism that provides both a guide for everyday life and a long-term vision of a possible future. This book offers a detailed portrait of these communities’ histories, environmental and social practices, religious values, and hopes for the future. It compares the differences and commonalities in their ethical systems, in the context of the larger religious traditions and social movements out of which they emerge. Another important area of comparison is the communities’ efforts to develop sustainable farming practices, as part of a larger argument about the importance of agriculture for both social and environmental ethics. Although the Amish and Salvadoran communities differ in many important aspects, their collective experiences suggest that efforts to create more environmentally sustainable practices and societies have a greater chance of success if they share certain common traits. These include a strong collective identity and commitment to the common good; deep attachment to local landscapes and species combined with awareness of larger dynamics; a desire to preserve non-human as well as human lives; and a utopian horizon that provides both goals and the hope of reaching them.

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.