Placing, Displacing, Replacing the Sacred: Science, Religion, and Spirituality

Sideris’s concern here is a little puzzling because she showed great insight a decade back, cautioning about an ethic that was overly romanticabout harmonious ecosystems and oblivious to the more real science of nature red-in-tooth-and-claw (Sideris 2003). She judged that the accounts of many ecotheologians—especially ecofeminists such as Sallie McFague and Rosemary Radford Ruether—were ‘insuflciently grounded in what science reveals to be real and true’ (as she puts it, p. 141). Now she is swinging the pendulum to the other side, warning against taking science so seriously that one elevates it into a ‘new sacred myth for our times’ (p. 137).