Review of Willis Jenkinss After Lynn White: Religious Ethics and Environmental Problems

W. Jenkins, After Lynn White: Religious Ethics and Environmental Problems Journal of Religious Ethics, Vol. 37 (2), 2009, pp. 283-309.

This article written by Willis Jenkins in 2009. He is one of Margaret Farley Assistant Professor of Social Ethics at Yale Divinity School. He obtained his degree at Wheaton College in Biblical and Theological Studies in May 1997 and continue his master followed by doctoral at University of Virginia in the field of Religious Studies in May 2006. He published the Ecologies of Grace: Environmental Ethics and Christian Theology book in 2008 and Sustainability and Christian Ethics (manuscript in progress). He had wrote many articles, edited volumes, book chapters and volume entries, review essays, church documents, conference presentations; giving talk for the lectures and also involved in the research fellowship. He also being acknowledge by getting the awards and grants for his locally and also international work experience.

The overview of the article is to examines the critiques of Whites five pages published in the journal Science in 1967 and presents a pluralist alternative that focuses religious ethics on the contextual strategies produced by moral communities as they confront environmental problems. Willis Jenkins make an early statement that Christian environmental theologies have been especially shaped by Whites thesis because they have needed to fashion some response to the elegant power of his complaint. In other words, he stated that these responses might reaffirm, reconstruct, retrieve, or revise the Christian worldview.

He divided the problems arose from the article published by the Lynn Whites into two category; environment or ecology and religion. Willis also try to relate the religious ethics to understand the environmental problems. He made an argument using certain aspects of the cosmological approach since it recognizes how practical strategies draw on worldviews as a resource for inventing new capacities from their moral traditions. The Christian being the basic religion to concerns for the author because Whites made the Christian as the main objective in his article. The reviews being written in this article are:

1.

The Methods of Religion and Ecology

2. Pragmatism in Environmental Ethics 3. Interpreting Religious Environmentalisms 4. Cultivating and Critiquing Religious Environmentalisms

For The Methods of Religion and Ecology, Willis stated that Christian ethics must face this methodological question before developing a theological response and to settle the troubles with Whites legacy, religious ethics must defend or elaborate its understanding of environmental problems.

Pragmatism in Environmental Ethics touch on the Christian environmental ethic might generate more effective theological responses by working from the various ways that faith communities already address environmental problems. Ethics can entertain that methodological hypothesis because of another cultural change since 1967: the rise of religious environmentalisms.

He also mention about Interpreting Religious Environmentalisms as the methodology. Beginning with the practical strategies of specific problem communities also underscores how this contextually pluralist methodology retains a significant role for cosmology. As other communities work in similar trajectories, Whites thesis may be an important resource for many imaginative reform strategies.

Cultivating and Critiquing Religious Environmentalisms while Christian ethics has good reason to reconsider Whites cosmological legacy in the organization of its work. He also sketched a role for Christian environmental ethics. Ethics assumes a methodological obligation and practical theological strategies create possibilities for religious and cultural change by producing new moral capacities from received traditions in response to difficult problems.

The conclusion for his article, he argued that ethicists should not seek to close that fertile gap between environmental problems and moral traditions, but rather attend to the various strategies that seek to make it as productive as possible.

In my opinion, this well-written 27 pages articles discussed in depth to answer the arise questions among theologies and environmentalists regarding Whites thesis. It is also the best effort for the author to simplify the methodology which may lead on solving the religious ethics and environmental problems. The moral that I can get from this article is the importance of collecting the evidence from various sources something to rely on when making a statement. This can be seen clearly most of the statements to critique the Whites thesis being supported by the influenced people in that field, especially in religion and environment aspects.

Conclusion, the After Lynn White: Religious Ethics and Environmental Problems was born at time while most of the people in the world are looking forward to the answer of the questions arise regarding the ethics in religious and the problems in the environment in relations to Whites article. The publication in 2009 also supports that somehow not necessary that the old theory cannot be readjusted to the new adaptations with the advancement of technology and peoples way of thought from time to time.