This book looks at what art reveals about the environmental values of Christianity. As western Europe transitioned to Christianity, pagan religious aesthetics changed or were displaced. Focusing on Christian art and architecture from early third-century Rome to seventeenth-century Netherlands, Susan Power Bratton examines this transition. She explores the relationship between Christ and nature in emergent Christian art, the role nonhumans play in this art, and how Christian art represents the ownership and management of natural resources.

The first section of the book discusses Christian...

Food, Farming, and Faith looks at agricultural sustainability and Christianity. Using scripture and science, Gary W. Fick--a Christian agricultural scientist--demonstrates that faith can inform decisions about creating, managing, even consuming our food. The book highlights such topics as food and celebration, environmental care, ecology and faith, soil and water stewardship, animal welfare, and the impact of poverty on women and our food supply. Throughout, Fick presents and discusses biblical passages that comment on these areas and provides insight from personal experiences growing up in a...

Plants are people too? No, but in this work of philosophical botany Matthew Hall challenges readers to reconsider the moral standing of plants, arguing that they are other-than-human persons. Plants constitute the bulk of our visible biomass, underpin all natural ecosystems, and make life on Earth possible. Yet plants are considered passive and insensitive beings rightly placed outside moral consideration. As the human assault on nature continues, more ethical behavior toward plants is needed. Hall surveys Western, Eastern, Pagan, and Indigenous thought as well as modern science for attitudes...