RT Article
T1 What Christian Environmental Ethics Can Learn from Stewardship’s Critics and Competitors
JF Studies in Christian ethics
VO 33
IS 4
SP 529
OP 548
A1 Simmons, Frederick V.
LA English
YR 2020
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1727038592
AB In this article I distill a trio of lessons for Christian environmental ethics from the stewardship model’s detractors and rivals. I begin by delineating stewardship and explaining the model’s initial prevalence as Christians’ primary response to widespread recognition of environmental crisis and their faith’s alleged culpability for it. I then distinguish two waves of criticism that, by denouncing stewardship’s substance and method, thoroughly discredited the model among Christian ethicists. Yet, as stewardship was being rejected for its susceptibility to anthropocentrism, one of its chief competitors—the land ethic—was being repudiated for its liability to misanthropy. I argue that these developments give Christians cause to (1) affirm a hierarchical non-anthropocentrism that prioritizes human interests; (2) premise such priority in part on human embrace of non-anthropocentrism; and (3) interpret environmental ethics as more than a matter of models like stewardship.
K1 Anthropocentrism
K1 Cosmology
K1 Environmental Ethics
K1 land ethic
K1 non-anthropocentrism
K1 Stewardship
DO 10.1177/0953946819859513