Professor Alexander J.B. Hampton has won an SSHRC Connections Grant to support the editorship of the Cambridge Companion to Religion, Nature and the Environment in the West.
The radical alteration of the state of the planet by anthropogenic factors has prompted a deeper critical awareness and active engagement of our inherited collective conceptualisation of the natural environment and our place within it. Increasingly this critical awareness questions the deeply-embedded concepts that structure the human-nature relationship itself. To address environmental crisis therefore involves not just scientific knowledge and technological solutions, but also a critical understanding, and re-evaluation of the cultural and civilizational framework in which these are deployed.
This addition to the authoritative Cambridge Companion series brings together seventeen international experts to consider the role of religion in the western tradition in forming our collective global concept of nature. In doing so, it will offer both a historical and conceptual resource for understanding our problematic relationship with the environment, and an intellectual resource for reconceptualizing nature and the place of humans within it. More information may be found here.
Alexander J.B. Hampton is an assistant professor in the Department for the Study of Religion. His research and teaching fall under three interrelated areas: First, the history of the philosophy of religion, with a focus on the complex and creative relationship between Christianity and Platonism. Second, the relationship between religion and aesthetics, with a focus on the interactions between poetics, metaphysics and spirituality, and third, encompassing both of these areas, his work examines the entanglements between religion and nature, as explored in Pandemic, Ecology and Theology (Routledge, 2020), and the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Religion, Nature and the Environment in the West (Cambridge University Press).