The main concern of this dissertation is exploring and elucidating the nature and the relationship of religion/spirituality and ethics in the context of environmentalism, within the larger arena of liberal, technological society. It is driven foremost by a need for clear understanding of not only what these terms mean and what they represent, but also what it all means for where we stand today as ethical and spiritual beings. For in pursuing this topic, one must necessarily ask larger questions, namely: What does it mean to be ethical in technological society? What does it mean to be ‘spiritual’ in a ‘secular’ society? Are either of these things even possible? These questions form the backdrop of my particular focus on environmentalism.
Through analysis of my own ethnographic research with members of the Sierra Club of Canada, and through use of the theoretical frameworks provided by four primary thinkers (Juan Luis Segundo, Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor and Jacques Ellul), I conclude that environmentalism, though far from problem-free, represents a ‘healthy’ form of ethical and spiritual expression in modern technological society. Part of this conclusion is the position that we are still very much ethical beings in technological society, and very much spiritual beings in secular society (though the latter is far more dependent on individual definitions of this term), and that in fact these two things relate directly.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TORONTO/oai:tspace.library.utoronto.ca:1807/17319 |
| Date | 26 February 2009 |
| Creators | Maintenay, Andre Luc |
| Contributors | Schmidt, Lawrence, Scharper, Stephen |
| Source Sets | University of Toronto |
| Language | en_ca |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | 1045437 bytes, application/pdf |
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