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Article: Saving the creation: Christian environmentalism in the United States.
- Article from:
- Sociology of Religion
- Article date:
- March 22, 1996
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1996 Association for the Sociology of Religion. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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"Christianity bears a huge burden of guilt" for the ecological crisis, historian Lynn White charged in an infamous (at least to religious ecologists) 1966 address to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1967:1206). The response to this crisis, White went on to argue, must have a religious grounding since its roots were religious.
Despite the scholarly controversy over the validity of White's thesis (e.g., Dubos 1973), to many observers, White's verdict seemed to be empirically confirmed. In a period both of church declarations on social issues and of growing secular environmental concern, religious ecological voices were few. Thus it became common wisdom that ...