The Animal Turn in Religious Studies (Review Essay)

A review of Aaron S. Gross' "The Question of the Animal and Religion: Theoretical Stakes, Practical Implications." (Columbia UP: 2014) Originally published in the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture, 10.4 (2016): 516-518. https://journals.equinoxpub.com/index.php/JSRNC/article/view/28899/28931

The field of religious studies has recently begun to explore a number of aspects of the relationship between animals and religion. The bulk of these explorations have been focused on reconsidering human ethical relationships with animals in light of religious values or exploring the textual and ritual meanings of animal bodies against the background of human religions. Another line of inquiry, the topic of this paper, looks at the religious experiences of animals themselves, and draws these questions into methodological conversations within the study of religion generally. This paper surveys a variety of approaches to animal religion from two disciplinary perspectives: comparative religion and cognitive ethology. From comparative religion, building on the work of Kimberley Patton, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, Creek, Cherokee, Christian, and Islamic understandings of the religious lives of animals are explored in turn. From cognitive ethology, two approaches are developed: across-species look at animal responses to death, building on the work of Marc Bekoff, and a specific look at religious practices within the order Primates. Ultimately, the paper concludes, the study of animal religion must proceed by thinking along two lines found throughout these accounts: the differences between animal bodies (what Jacques Derrida calls the “het-erogeneous multiplicity” of animals) and the orientation of religious bodies to affect. Rather than thinking of religion as one thing, we must conceive of religion as multiple, corresponding to the multiplicity of embodied lifeways found among animals. And rather than thinking of religion as inextricable from belief,we must begin to explore the emotional patterns that make up religion among animals—human and nonhuman. These thematic anchors of animal religion have direct implications for the study of religion itself, especially in light of what Manuel Vásquez has called the “materialist shift” in religious studies.

2003

85 In 1903 W.E.B. Du Bois predicted, “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line” (1969). One hundred years later, we can hope that the twentieth century achieved important advances for human liberation—not only racial but also sexual and political. Will that moral trajectory—the expansion of fundamental protections now easily seen as the hallmark of the last century—continue? Will the problem of the twenty-first century be the problem of the species line? For protections to evolve to include nonhuman species, religions— through their leaders, their institutions, and above all their believers— must take seriously the important role that they have played, and certainly will continue to play, in humans’ engagement with the lives beyond our species line. Religions have such a central role in the transmission of basic images and values regarding living beings that, without their help, the problem of the species line will not be solved in this century. A centra...

Humanimalia, 2018

Over the last few of years, coming on the heels of a general turn toward the animal within the humanities and social sciences, a turn toward the animal and religion has taken place. This paper seeks to highlight some of the reasons why this turn has begun to take place and why thus turn has begun to take place only now. The works of Aaron Gross and Donovan Schaefer, I contend, represent a turning point in the history of the subject of religious studies for, in their work, other (non-human) animals are considered, as possible religious agents. Here, I engage the work of G.W.F. Hegel, Jacques Derrida, Émile Durkheim, J.Z. Smith, and Georges Bataille, to demonstrate the extent to which our thinking about religion has determined who can count as a religious subject and why the relatively recent turn toward religion and animals constitutes such a significant gesture within the history of religious studies and, for that matter, within the humanities in general.

2018

Until one has loved an animal, a part of one's soul remains unawakened .

Archaeological Imaginations of Religion, 2014

Ethnographic evidence indicates that animals play complex, overlapping roles as food, sacred objects, and mythic creatures. Yet our reconstructions of animals in religions of the past tend to represent functional categories in which animals are objects to be dominated. In this chapter, I suggest that we fail to appreciate the range of roles animals played in prehistoric religions, in part because we have few modern Western analogs. This chapter takes a critical look at our neglect of animals in past religions and advocates greater attention to animals as agents and mythic subjects.

Vetus Testamentum, 2024

Three new monographs have appeared in 2023 that explore the Bible and nonhuman animals: Peter Joshua Atkins, The Animalizing Affliction of Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel 4: Reading Across the Human-Animal Boundary (London: T&T Clark, 2023); Dong Hyeon Jeong, Embracing the Nonhuman in the Gospel of Mark (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2023); Saul M. Olyan, Animal Rights and the Hebrew Bible (New York: OUP, 2023). This review brings these books into conversation, suggesting six questions that they grapple with and which might stimulate further research.

If ever there was a reference work that belongs in the personal libraries of scholars of religion, this one is it. It is presumably available by now in most reputable academic and public libraries, but given the extraordinary richness of its diverse and often unanticipated entries, and the urgency of the ecological issues that many of them address, this collection of well-written and often engrossing essays should be kept readily at hand for frequent and sustained browsing....

Anthrozoös, 2002