Reconsidering Nature Religion

Nature religion is a much broader and more pervasive part of our culture than we may know. In the late twentieth century, for example, certain nature-based New Age perspectives and practices emerged-developments whose seeds were planted in the nature religion of nineteenth-century America.

In Reconsidering Nature Religion, Catherine Albanese looks at the place where nature and religion come together, and explores how this operates in contemporary life and thinking. Nature, she says, functions as an absolute that grounds and orients life. Religion concerns the ways that people use this absolute of nature to form a meaningful life. And religion itself provides ways of interacting with nature.

Nature religion is one essential way that people relate to the ordinary and extra-ordinary aspects of their worlds. It was so for people like the famous naturalist John Muir, and remains so for us today. For all of us, nature works in a religious way that informs and transforms life.