Spiritual Temporalities Among Christian Environmentalists in Britain in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

In recent years, environmental scientists, political leaders, and communities have begun to press for more holistic and embedded engagements with the global environmental crisis. One strand of this broader push has focussed on the role of lay knowledge and experience in shaping public responses to environmental problems, including religious and culturally specific responses. In this paper, I will focus on the lay experience of time reckoning as an arena for intervention. In contrast to the focus by scholars, activists and environmental NGOs on rehabilitating the human relationship with place, time is much neglected. As I will suggest below, this focus on time is particularly salient for our analysis of modern religious environmental movements as we find quite dramatically different framings by different groups, and also some peculiarly modern framings. In particular, I want to focus on the recent and now global push among Christian and activist groups to celebrate a new liturgical season, ‘Creation Time’ and compare the forms of time reckoning at work there with seasonally specific rituals and festivals celebrated by contemporary neopagan groups.

Jeremy Kidwell

Associate Professor in Theological Ethics

Ethicist, activist, hacker, ethnographer and eco-theologian. Interdisciplinary and unafraid.