Eco-spirituality: religion and the new space-time grammar

Abstract

This paper theoretically discusses the relation between ecology and religion in late modernity and questions whether eco-spirituality would be a new space-time grammar. Our purpose is to understand some of the religious responses to the interpellations raised by the environmental crisis. We understand that ecological contingencies stimulate new religious conceptions and practices in time and space and promote a shift from institutionalized religion to a dimension of spirituality. Methodologically, we apply bibliographical revision guided by the religion-ecology binomial to support the hypothesis that eco-spirituality, conjugated in the plural as ecologically reimagined religiousness, seeks to counteract the teleology of progress that moves in a linear space-time, evolutionist and positivist- quantitative perspective. The eco-spirituality brings environmental sensitivity to the holistic horizon of the relationship between humans and nonhumans.