UF professor leads creation of international religion/nature society

December 7, 2005

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — A University of Florida professor has led the creation of the first International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, which will hold its inaugural conference next spring at UF.

The society will promote critical inquiry into the relationships among human beings and their diverse cultures, environments, and religious beliefs and practices, according to its Web site, www.religionandnature.com.

“This is where scholars who are interested in the relationships between environments, religions and cultures can come and bring their own perspectives and their own interdisciplinary lenses into a broader conversation,” said Bron Taylor, UF Samuel S. Hill Eminent Scholar in religion, who is serving as interim society president.

About 100 people are expected to attend the society’s first conference April 6-9.

Taylor has been developing the idea for the organization for nearly a decade, but plans started to take shape after the publication of the Encyclopedia for Religion and Nature, which he edited and published in April.

“This past summer I was invited to meet with the European Network for Religion and the Environment to present a paper and talk about their initiative in Europe and ours in the States,” Taylor said. “I pitched the idea of creating an international society, and they were very keen on it. I then began to shop this idea around in the professional societies for religion and anthropology, environmental history and ethics.”

After receiving interest from those fields, Taylor organized a meeting for the society at UF that included scholars from Europe and across the United States. Participants began planning the society’s inaugural conference, “Exploring Religion, Nature, & Culture” next spring. Plans also are under way to begin publishing a professional journal for the study of religion, nature and culture in the first quarter of 2007.

“I don’t think any of these disciplines are adequately strong in the absence of the other ones,” Taylor said. “All too often people who are interested in these disciplines, if they are inadequately trained in the other areas, make unwarranted assumptions in the very premises on which their research is based.”

One of the ideas behind the international society is to connect researchers from these related areas for the benefit of collaborative research.

“There’s something in the face-to-face interchange and the argumentation and debate that’s valuable, and those informal conversations lead to collaborations and new research projects,” Taylor said. “If folks who work across disciplines never hang out together, some of those possibilities never will materialize.”

Taylor said researchers from several UF departments are leading the religion and nature initiative, including people from botany, natural resources and environment, anthropology and other researchers and graduate students in the religious studies department.

“I’ve always been interested in interdisciplinary studies,” he said. “UF is very much an interdisciplinary place with a lot of people focused on the environment, so it’s a good place to spearhead these kinds of issues.”

A professor of philosophy at Worcester Polytechnic Institute says the environmental crisis is a challenge to every aspect of our culture.

“This new society will help to focus and further the groundbreaking work already under way as religious instructors, theologians and communities respond to the crisis,” said Roger S. Gottlieb. “I cannot think of any task more important for intellectuals who want their ideas to matter.”

Another reason to create the society is to explore the hypothesis that people’s religious attitudes and beliefs have something to do with how they relate to nature, Taylor said.

“I think that there’s at least some evidence that the hypothesis has merit, at least in some cases,” he said. “That means this emerging field has a lot to do with the flourishing of human beings and the life forms with whom we share this planet, so ultimately it is an academic field that has both practical and ethical implications and importance.”

Taylor expects membership will grow to several hundred in the first few years.