Dissident Heart wrote:I've suggested Booktalk read Gottlieb's "A Greener Faith: Religious Environmentalism and Our Planet's Future" in the past, and have found little success in getting much support for it. Actually, there was a time at Booktalk when to even suggest a book like Gottlieb's was anathema to the mission of the site....somewhere in the annals you can find how the contentious conversation unfolded. Still, I'm hoping to find a smattering of smart readers who are interested in a very fine piece of scholarship that, I think, engages the most important issues of our contemporary world...environmental ethics, economic practice, industrial planning and how to redirect the course of impending ecological devastation: with a central focus upon how religion can and does provide solutions...at least as far as religious environmentalism participates on the local and world stages. This book will not debate the existence of God, nor will it offer reasons for why God exists: it will offer multiple examples of how religious individuals and communities mobilize the transformation of their traditions and lifestyles into something more ecologically responsible and caring of the earth. It will not argue that one religion is better than the rest, or that all are the same: it will show ways that different religions are struggling to be more environmentally accountable and politically engaged in shaping saner ecological policies. All readers, religious or not, will be challenged to find new ways of living that reconnects individuals to communities and to their ecosystems...in more moral and, yes, even spiritual ways. The book is also a powerful critique of religious fundamentalism, corporate globalization, and blind consumerism... carefully identifying the ways in which these interconnected threats converge upon our lives and the planet in devastating ways. It is a book about solutions: showing countless examples from across the planet and from the many world religions where lives can change, practices can develop, and fundamental alteration to planetary damage can cease. I hope more are interested in the book. I think it will be worth all of our efforts to read it.