Religious Environmental Activism: Emerging Conflicts and Tensions in Earth Stewardship, edited by Jens Khrsen, Julia Blanc and Fabian Huber. Editors. Routledge: Abingdon, 202., Pp. 340. Hardback: 120, Ebook: open access, ISBN 9780367862534. Unlike the first book reviewed above which focused on Africa, this volume is a cross-continental and interreligious assessment of the various tensions and difficulties arising in the relationship between religion and environmental issues. The perspectives discussed are drawn widely from regions across the Global North and Global South divide. Furthermore, unlike the first book which dwelt more on how religion might contribute to the protection of the environment and reduce the impacts of climate change, this volume specifically invokes caution towards such an optimistic position by emphasizing the problems that might make it difficult for religion to achieve these objectives.

Downloaded from Brill.com 03/03/2024 07:47:51PM via Open Access. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC BY 4.0 license. Religion & Development 2 (2023) 149154 152 Tabalaka This volume critically presents composite details on religious commitments to environmentalism drawn from the various religious actors across the globe, such as mainline Christianity groups like Catholicism (Gojowczyk in chapter 2, Monnot in chapter 4), Islam (Jamil in chapter 5), African independent churches (Stork and de Toit in chapter 10), and Judaism (Herman in chapter 11). While the volume seems to be focused on what is often called world religions, in particular mainstream Christianity, it is worth noting that even the views of alternative spiritualities usually regarded as non-mainstream religions, such as Anthroposophy (see Majerus in chapter 3), are featured here as well.

The contributions generally bring to the fore the problematic nature of religion and environment interactions, whether within a given religion or among different religions. Within a given religion, examples are provided to show that due to the differing views of adherents and structural or hierarchical institutional obstructions, positive efforts geared towards promoting religious environmentalism may not succeed. Such is the case with Pope Francis encyclical Laudato Si, which is the Catholic Churchs call for everyone to address the impending environmental challenges. However, such a positive position has unfortunately provoked seemingly unquenchable tensions and debates among both believers and academics within the religious denomination.

Challenges in the greening of religion could be the failure to actualize positive views that religions may have toward the environment, or debilitating and incapacitating beliefs of perceiving climate change as a matter of fate or as fulfilment of prophecy. The volume thus manages to show that while there is a growing voice that sees religion as a solution to, or a possible driver of, dealing with environmental problems, religion is itself a problem and an impediment to the solution. Overall, the volume seems to suggest that religion might promote negative attitudes towards environmental issues, such as denial of environmental problems, accepting the status quo of negative climate change trends, promoting inaction towards ecological challenges, discouraging efforts to alleviate environmental challenges, and sponsoring practices that aggravate the problem.