CFP on Jewish Environmental Ethics

We are pleased to share the following CFP from Worldviews for a special issue focused on Jewish environmental ethics.

Call for Papers: New Approaches to Jewish Environmental Ethics

Call for papers (c. 5000-6000 words) for a special issue of Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture, and Ecology focused on new approaches to Jewish environmental ethics.

The aim of this issue is to examine contemporary questions of ecology and ethics from a Jewish lens, broadly construed, revising prevalent assumptions regarding nature and culture in Jewish thought. We invite submissions of textual, sociological, anthropological, and cultural basis—from any time period and geographic location—that interrogate the place of humanity’s
conceptualization of and duties to the nonhuman world.

We are interested in essays that tackle specific problems or questions (climate change, animal rights, pollution, climate engineering, etc.), as well as contributions that go beyond the oftreiterated binaries of “nature and culture” and “humans and animals” and thereby offer new perspectives on the richness of premodern or modern Jewish approaches to the nonhuman and the environment. We invite essays that interrogate these binaries in the texts or historical moments under study, expose alternative or surprising positions within premodern Jewish texts, as well as showing the insidious effects of such binaries in modern Jewish works.

We also welcome contributions that explore how Jewish texts and authors surely deploy their own binaries, such as between humans and animals or the settled and the wild, showing how Jewish texts present their own entanglement of ontology and ethics that is sometimes at odds with—and sometimes complementary to—the contiguous cultures and peoples they live with and amongst.

Submissions that engaged with questions of broader issues of comparative religious ethics, religion and law, and the interface of religion and culture are particularly welcome.

We are also open to pedagogical submissions that explore how to integrate the nonhuman into general Jewish studies courses, or how research in Jewish studies may be enriched through thinking with the nonhuman and the world. Surveys of past work in Jewish environmental ethics are welcome, provided that they propose new avenues for thought and exploration.

The deadline for submitting an abstract of 300-500 words is February 21st, 2020. Submitters will be notified as to the status of their proposal by March 15th and final essays will be due June 9, 2020. All final publication decisions are at the discretion of editors and the Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture, and Ecology editorial board. Please submit all abstracts to . Please direct all questions to and .

Guest Editors:
Alexander M. Weisberg, New York University
Ariel Evan Mayse, Stanford University

You can download the entire CFP here.