Laudato Si’: Integral Ecology and Preferential Option for the Poor

This essay examines Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato si’ from a Latin American perspective and its reception in this part of the world, especially in Brazil. It focuses on two aspects of Laudato si’: its dialogical approach, and the connection it makes between ecological issues and poverty. These two aspects allow us to understand Francis’s proposal of integral ecology and how the preferential option for the poor becomes central to his perspective. In addition, this essay explains how Latin American theology and pastoral experience are present in Pope Francis’s thought.     

Laudato Si’: Care for Creation at the Center of a New Social Issue

This essay reviews the documents of the pontifical magisterium of the Church from the encyclical Mater et magistra ( 1961 ) to the exhortation Evangelii gaudium (2013), in order to show the Church’s historical commitment to the defense of the environment. It then argues that Laudato si’ elevates the theological status of the environmental crisis to that of a new social issue, much as Leo XIII did for the industrial crisis with his encyclical letter Rerum novarum ( 1891 ).     

‘The Only Creature God Willed For Its Own Sake’: Anthropocentrism in Laudato Si’ and Gaudium et Spes

The Second Vatican Council’s constitution Gaudium et Spes stated that man is ‘the only creature on earth that God has willed for its own sake’. Post-conciliar Catholic teaching on the environment largely reproduced this anthropocentric theology. Pope Francis’ encyclical letter Laudato Si’, however, appears directly to contradict this well-established tradition with its repeated assertions of the intrinsic value of nonhuman life and its critical approach to the term ‘anthropocentrism’. Questioning this putative discontinuity, this article challenges the perception that Laudato Si’ has definitively rejected anthropocentrism. It suggests that the claim for the intrinsic value of nonhuman life, and the traditional assertion that man is the only creature willed for its own sake, can be seen to converge in light of the traditional theological anthropology of the human being as microcosm. On this view, the centrality of the human person in the order of creation is constituted by its gathering up of the sakes of creatures. The distinctive place of the human does not come at the expense of the rest of creation, but rather is the means of creation’s movement towards the unity and harmony to which God calls it. Laudato Si’ is distinguished not by its rejection of anthropocentrism, but by its refusal to set human and nonhuman over against one another. In contrast, the language of ‘intrinsic value’ is criticised for conceiving created value as a zero-sum game, as though human and nonhuman value are in competition with one another; the language of ‘stewardship’ is criticised for its extrinsicist conception of the human being in the natural order.     

“Everything Is Interrelated”

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that “everything is interrelated,” especially in relation to health, ecology, economy, and climate change, as various authors have stated. The motto is the leitmotif of Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato si’ and leads to his proposal of an integral ecology. This article deepens the implications of the latter in the encyclical and in other works and shows how the Catholic Synod of Bishops for the Pan-Amazon Region is an example of the reception and application of integral ecology in a given context. Based on this, the article proposes some conclusions, taking into account the theme of the next assembly of the World Council of Churches in 2022.     

Introduction to Focus Issue on Laudato Si'

The encyclical Laudato si’ can be read as a religious ethic in several different ways. Contributors to this focus issue read it as magisterial teaching, as environmental thought, as Global South criticism, as Latinx theology, and as philosophy of religion. Foregrounding South American and Latinx receptions, the cumulative argument of this focus issue is that LS represents a cultural event that invites interpretations from contexts and disciplines beyond North Atlantic theological ethics.     

The Destiny of Creation: Theological Ethical Reflections on Laudato Si'

In this essay, I ask what the precise relation is between Laudato si's theology and its claims about our individual and corporate responsibility for the environment and the plight of the poor. To do so, I first clarify the relationship between the theological claims and its account of moral norms, situating the text within the history of western ethical theory. I then turn to reconstruct the submerged theology of the encyclical, focusing on Pope Francis's accounts of the techno‐economic paradigm and the possibility of an “integral ecology” paradigm. I end by assessing the text in terms of the coherence and plausibility of its argument as an ethical and theological statement.     

WONDER OPENS THE HEART: POPE FRANCIS AND LISA SIDERIS ON NATURE,ENCOUNTER, AND WONDER

This article argues that Pope Francis's invocations of wonder can speak to and at times challenge Lisa Sideris's recent contributions to the interdisciplinary discussion of wonder, science, and religion. Although the importance of wonder to Pope Francis's 2015 environmental encyclical Laudato si’ is acknowledged, it has not been widely recognized that wonder is implicated in and forms connections between multiple concepts and postures acknowledged as defining marks of Francis's papacy: coming out of oneself, encountering others, going to the margins; aversion to doctrinal rigidity; compassion, mercy, tenderness, and humility; to name a few. These defining concepts and stances resonate strongly with certain views on wonder, ethics, and ecology recently articulated by Lisa Sideris. In Francis, however, one finds a more affirming treatment of science‐based wonder and a response to Sideris's criticism of theistic wonder.     

“Our Sister,Mother Earth”: Solidarity and Familial Ecology in Laudato Si’

Laudato si’, with its articulation of a familial ecology reflecting Francis’s Latin American context, expands the subject of solidarity in Catholic social teaching and thought. Yet, this ecological vision of family fails to attend to the problem of gender subordination latent in Catholic social teaching, including in its approaches to ecology. A vision of solidarity that eradicates gender and ecological subordination must elaborate a familial ecology characterized by both mercy and equality.     

Post,Oblique, Human

Abstract

Taking its cue from the oblique of Elaine L. Graham's ‘post/human’, this essay examines the difficult relationship between humanism and its ‘post’. If, as Graham points out, the present moment is one in which anthropocentrism is both in crisis and deferred to as ‘common sense’, what is to be done? Perhaps the answer lies in strategies for ‘obliquing’ humanist discourse, working through its contradictions in order to establish the ‘post/human’ as a figure that forever disrupts humanism.     

In Communion with God’s Sparrow: Incorporating Animal Agency into the Environmental Vision of <Emphasis Type="Italic">Laudato Sí</Emphasis>

Although a conventional environmentalism focuses on the health of ecological systems, Pope Francis’s 2015 environmental encyclical Laudato Sí invokes St. Francis of Assisi to emphasize God’s love for the individual organism, no matter how small. Decrying the tendency to regard other creatures as mere objects to be controlled and used, Pope Francis urges our enactment of a ‘universal communion’ governed by love. I suggest, however, that Laudato Sí’s animal ethic, as focused on ordering human and animal need, is inadequate to its overarching vision of cross-species communion. This vision requires the sort of cross-species relational bridge implicit in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s view of agency as an irreducibly ‘animate’ expression of choice and afforded further definition in Kenneth J. Shapiro’s conception of a ‘kinesthetic empathy.’ As the phenomenological epistemology underlying both discourses makes possible a rough correspondence, I put these in conversation to demonstrate that a Merleau-Pontyan and reciprocal agency is a constitutive aspect of the fullest sort of cross-species relation, such that recognition of this agency can both deepen our understanding of ‘universal communion’ and foster engagement in its practice.     

CLIMATE CHANGE,LAUDATO SI', CREATION SPIRITUALITY,AND THE NOBILITY OF THE SCIENTIST'S VOCATION

This exploration into spirituality and climate change employs the “four paths” of the creation spirituality tradition. The author recognizes those paths in the rich teachings of Pope Francis’s encyclical, Laudato Si' and applies them in considering the nobility of the scientist's vocation. Premodern thinkers often resisted any split between science and religion. The author then lays out the basic archetypes for recognizing the sacredness of creation, namely, the Cosmic Christ (Christianity); the Buddha Nature (Buddhism); the Image of God (Judaism); the “Primordial Man” (Hinduism), as well as the premodern universal teaching of “God as Beauty.” He addresses the subject of evil which deserves serious attention in the face of the realities posed by climate change and the resistance to addressing them. In the concluding section, the author speaks of a new Order of the Sacred Earth that was launched in fall 2017 to gather persons of whatever spiritual tradition or none to devote themselves to preserving Mother Earth.     

What God Cannot Do: Divine Power,the Gratuity of Grace,and Henri De Lubac

When Pius XII promulgated his encyclical Humani generis in 1950, it was widely read as censuring Henri de Lubac’s views on human nature and the desire for God. In recent years, as controversies about nature and grace have revived, this reading of Humani generis has been widely assumed by supporters and critics of de Lubac alike. Henri de Lubac, however, always insisted that the encyclical did not touch his position. This article will argue that, whatever the objectives of the encyclical’s drafters, he was correct. It will make its case by turning to an issue neglected in contemporary debates about nature and grace: divine power. It will first trace the history of Christian reflection on divine power, a story whose twists and turns have only recently been uncovered by medieval historians, and then argue that, with this history in view, interpreting the crucial line in Humani generis as excluding de Lubac’s position becomes untenable. Finally, this article will discuss the implications of this conclusion for contemporary accounts of human nature, the desire for God, and the gratuity of grace.     

The Erotic Eucharist

Pope Benedict XVI's encyclical Deus Caritas Est continues the magisterium's twentieth‐century shift from an act‐oriented, procreative approach to sexual ethics to what I will term a heterosexually personalistic one. Situating a heterosexual anthropology within a heterosexual cosmology, Benedict argues that just as God loves humanity with heterosexual eros, so must human beings love each other heterosexually. Although Benedict depends upon the explanatory power of heterosexuality, he perhaps unwittingly ends up depicting God's love not as iconically heterosexual, but as queer. In casting God's love as queer, I do not, even analogously, impute to God a type of homosexuality as Benedict does a heterosexuality. Instead, by drawing attention to the discursive specificity and historical instability of both homosexuality and heterosexuality, I use “queer” to recognize God's love as beyond categorization and as strange; it cannot be corralled into or contained by the historically specific notions of heterosexual and homosexual. But this essay does not merely deconstruct Benedict's heterosexually personalistic cosmology. It uncovers in Benedict's Eucharistic transfiguration of marital love a new and promising way of situating discussions about the ethics of sex.     

How Ethical is Islamic Banking in the Light of the Objectives of Islamic Law?

Islamic banking is based on moral foundations that make it distinct from conventional banking. Some argue that because of its foundation in Islam, Islamic banking may represent a more morally appealing alternative. Yet, evidence shows that this is not the case. Indeed, the current practice of Islamic banking has not been able to achieve its goals which are based on Islam's moral values: to enhance justice, equitability, and social well‐being. This essay examines the extent to which Islamic banking is ethical and concludes that the practice of the industry does not seem to be de facto ethical from the Islamic perspective of ethical values. It only consists in trading the same instruments of conventional banks without genuinely enforcing Islam's ethical vision. The practice of Islamic banking misrepresents Islam and does not contribute to solving social problems. The interaction between maqasid al‐shari?a (objectives of Islamic law) and qiyās (deductive analogy) provides a supplementary tool for interpreting the failure of the prior in terms of the practical misuse of the latter by Islamic banks. This essay provides an interpretive approach to the current debate about why Islamic banking has failed and suggests ways to move cautiously in the future.     

Bio‐Theoacoustics: Prayer Outdoors and the Reality of the Natural World

What does it mean to pray when the Earth—the fabric of our bodies’ lives, and indeed of the incarnation itself—is profoundly endangered from human action? What would Christian prayer look like that was not “losing track of nature” but following its tracks, physically and spiritually immersed in the actual, present, threatened and wild life of the more‐than‐human world? Using categories outlined by Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his Ethics, this essay asserts that prayer and worship that take place entirely within the wall‐, speech‐, and screen‐mediated bubble of anthropocentrism risk becoming an abstraction. The essay explores this assertion in three moves: first, it delineates Bonhoeffer's assertion of the “abstraction” created by forms of Christian life in which God is conceived in separation from the world. Next, it shows how these categories—“God” and “world”—come together in prayer outdoors, understood both literally and metaphorically. And finally, it proposes how prayer outdoors might take shape for individuals or communities: a bio‐theoacoustics of prayer for the life of the world.     

Salomon Maimon’s Attempt at a New Presentation of the Principle of Morality and a New Deduction of Its Reality1

This essay is a translation of one of Salomon Maimon’s ethical writings, accompanied by a brief introduction. In it, Maimon proposes a correction of the Kantian moral principle of duty, as it is articulated both by Kant’s Groundwork for a Metaphysics of Morals and his Critique of Practical Reason. In particular, Maimon’s essay reveals the influence of Reinhold’s critique of Kant’s moral philosophy, especially regarding the role of incentives behind moral action. It reveals as well Maimon’s commitment to the primacy of the theoretical over the practical, drawn from his reading of Maimonides and Spinoza. The essay, therefore, marks an important moment in the development of Maimon’s assimilation of Kantian philosophy, one often neglected in scholarship on his work.     

The Methodological Impact of Fides et Ratio on Catholic Social Teaching

John Paul II’s encyclical Fides et Ratio is of astonishing importance for the methodology of Catholic social teaching. This article highlights three points that emerged as contributions of Fides et Ratio to the epistemology and methodology of the social magisterium. According to Gaudium et Spes, Catholic social teaching is essentially a service of the Church that affects social life indirectly by making a free offer of sense and faith. Fides et Ratio reinforces this paradigm shift by rejecting fideism also in matters of social morality. In this, it goes beyond Vatican I, Dei Filius. The encyclical further clarifies that the method of Catholic social teaching is tripartite and requires the cooperation of at least three disciplines: theology, philosophy, and social sciences. Because of the shifting character of history, Catholic social teaching too fluctuates. It is sensitive to time and place, to history and culture.     

The Buddhist Roots of Watsuji Tetsurô's Ethics of Emptiness

Watsuji Tetsurô (1889–1960) is famous for having constructed a systematic socio‐political ethics on the basis of the idea of emptiness. This essay examines his 1938 essay “The Concept of ‘Dharma’ and the Dialectics of Emptiness in Buddhist Philosophy” and the posthumously published The History of Buddhist Ethical Thought (based on lectures given in the 1920s), in order to clarify the Buddhist roots of his ethics. It aims to answer two main questions which are fundamentally linked: “Which way does Watsuji's legacy turn: toward totalitarianism or toward a balanced theory of selflessness?” and “Is Watsuji's systematic ethics Buddhist?” In order to answer these questions, this essay discusses Watsuji's view of dharma, dependent arising, and morality in Hīnayāna Buddhism. It then proceeds to Watsuji's fine‐tuning of the concept of emptiness in Mādhyamika and Yogācāra Buddhism. Finally, this essay shows how Watsuji's modernist Buddhist theory connects to his own systematic ethical theory. These two theories share a focus on non‐duality, negation, and emptiness. But they differ in their accounts of the relations between the individual and the community, between the “is” and the “ought,” and between hermeneutics and transcendence. These findings give us hints as to Watsuji's origins, pitfalls, and possibilities.     

The Mysterious Silence of Mother Earth in Laudato Si'

Laudato si' attempts simultaneously to disrupt prevailing global environmental discourse and to reorient central concepts in Catholic moral tradition by requalifying the meaning of dominion and by ecologically expanding human dignity. The image of Earth crying out to humans from within a kinship relation plays a central role in both arguments. However, the political consequences of those shifts remain vague because the “voice” of Earth remains silent in crucial loci of the encyclical's argument.