by John Grim

About John Grim

John Grim is currently a Senior Lecturer and Research Scholar at Yale University and Environmental Ethicist-in-Residence at Yale’s Center for Bioethics. With Mary Evelyn Tucker, he codirects Yale’s Forum on Religion and Ecology, a project arising from a series of conferences held from 1996 to 1998 at Harvard’s Center for the Study of World Religions. Grim is the author of The Shaman (1983) and an edited volume, Indigenous Traditions and Ecology (2001). With Mary Evelyn Tucker, he has coedited Religion and Ecology: Can the Climate Change? (2001) and a volume of Thomas Berry’s essays, The Christian Future and the Fate of Earth (2009).

Religion

book Keywords for Environmental Studies

Religions can be understood in their largest sense as a means whereby humans, recognizing the limitations of phenomenal reality, undertake specific practices to effect self-transformation and community cohesion within cosmological and natural contexts. Religions refer to those cosmological stories, symbol systems, ritual practices, ethical norms, historical processes, and institutional structures that transmit a view of the human as embedded in a world of meaning and responsibility, transformation and celebration. Religions connect humans with a divine presence or numinous force. They bond human communities, and they assist in forging intimate relations with the broader Earth community. In summary, religions link humans to the larger cultural, biological, and material matrices of life.