Item Detail
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24316
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1
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2
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English
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Flexibility in the Ecology of Ideas : Revelatory Religion and the Environment
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Dialogue : A Journal of Mormon Thought
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Summer 2011
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44
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2
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Stanford, CA
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Dialogue Foundation
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57-66
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"Latter-day Saints believe in the basic creation account in Genesis, yet that account has inspired both the destruction of and contempt for the world as well as affection for it and the desire to preserve it. The same creation text was wielded by the crusaders, the conquistadors, the Puritans, Saint Francis of Assisi, and Martin Luther King. Yet rather than simply jettisoning Christianity and its texts as insufficient or ambiguous to the point of uselessness, many Latter-day Saint thinkers may feel a kinship with thinkers such as essayist Wendell Berry who states: 'There are an enormous number of people--and I am one of them--whose native religion, for better or worse, is Christianity. We are born to it; we began to learn about it before we became conscious; it is, whatever we think of it, an intimate belonging of our being; it informs our consciousness, our language and our dreams. We can turn away from it or against it, but that will only bind us tightly to a reduced version of it.' Like Berry, most Latter-day Saints have been reared in the Western Judeo-Christian tradition, a tradition with a troubling cultural and environmental legacy. Yet unlike those who frame the Judeo-Christian/Western legacy in exclusively negative terms and speak of rejecting religion altogether, I believe that doing so often results in becoming bound to a reduced and often caricatured version of it. Most environmentally minded LDS thinkers would agree with Berry's affirmation that 'our native religion should survive and renew itself so that it may become as largely and truly instructive as we need it to be.' In this respect, Mormonism provides a framework with the requisite epistemological flexibility." [p. 60]