4 - Religious faith
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
Summary
RELIGIOUS NATURALISM
Striking examples of religious naturalism occur in the “nature religions” of Amerindians and other tribal peoples. As Catherine Albanese observes (1990: 21f.):
For native North Americans the numinous world of nature beings was always very close, and the land itself expressed their presence. Indian peoples created religious geographies in which specific sites were inhabited by sacred powers and persons … The sense of continuity with the sacred – and natural – world that was revealed in this language had its counterpart in a mythic sense of time, in which what we call history was conflated, for Amerindians, with events that had occurred outside of ordinary time.
Here, the well-being of individuals and society is seen to depend on their relation to sacred powers, beings, spaces, and times (23): “The material world was a holy place; and so harmony with nature beings and natural forms was the controlling ethic, reciprocity the recognized mode of interaction. Ritual functioned to restore a lost harmony, like a great balancing act bringing the people back to right relation with the world.” Albanese concludes, “an ecological perspective came, for the most part, easily – if unselfconsciously – among traditional tribal peoples.”
What does it mean for the world to be “inhabited by sacred powers and persons”? Part of what it means is that the world in which tribal peoples live contains, so they believe, extraordinary, supernatural entities.
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- Information
- Nature, God and HumanityEnvisioning an Ethics of Nature, pp. 105 - 135Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002