The ‘Greening’ of Christian Monasticism and the Future of Monastic Landscapes in North America
Department of Humanities, Faculty of Environment, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, BC V6B 5K3, Canada
Religions 2019, 10(7), 432; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel10070432
Received: 12 June 2019 / Revised: 9 July 2019 / Accepted: 11 July 2019 / Published: 16 July 2019
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Exploring the Future of Christian Monasticisms)
Christian monasticism has an ancient land-based foundation. The desert fathers and later reform movements appealed to the land for sustenance, spiritual metaphor, and as a marker of authentic monastic identity. Contemporary Roman Catholic monastics with this history in mind, have actively engaged environmental discourse in ways that draw from their respective monastic lineages, a process sociologist Stephen Ellingson calls ‘bridging’. Though this study is of limited scope, this bridging between monastic lineages and environmental discourse could cautiously be identified with the broader phenomenon of the ‘greening’ of Christianity. Looking to the future, while the footprint of North American monastic communities is quite small, and their numbers are slowly declining, a variety of conservation-minded management schemes implemented since the 1990s by some communities suggests that the impact will remain for many decades to come.
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Keywords:
religion and ecology; spiritual ecology; greening of religion; environmental humanities; monasticism; history of monasticism; landscape
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited
MDPI and ACS Style
Brown, J.M. The ‘Greening’ of Christian Monasticism and the Future of Monastic Landscapes in North America. Religions 2019, 10, 432. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel10070432
AMA Style
Brown JM. The ‘Greening’ of Christian Monasticism and the Future of Monastic Landscapes in North America. Religions. 2019; 10(7):432. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel10070432
Chicago/Turabian StyleBrown, Jason M. 2019. "The ‘Greening’ of Christian Monasticism and the Future of Monastic Landscapes in North America" Religions 10, no. 7: 432. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel10070432
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