Jeffrey Bilbro is an assistant professor of English at Spring Arbor University in Michigan, USA. His articles have been published in Christianity and Literature, Early American Literature, Mississippi Quarterly, and the Southern Literary Journal.
"In this fresh and invigorating study, Jeffrey Bilbro skillfully
weaves his way through four centuries of American history. Loving
God's Wildness takes us on a journey from William Bradford in the
seventeenth century to Wendell Berry in the twenty-first as it maps
the complex and often vexing interplay between Christianity and the
environment in the life and literature of the New World. With
impressive clarity and conviction, Bilbro argues that many of
America's greatest writers have turned to Christian theology for
the resources they need 'to practice their love for the wild
world.' This is indeed a book worth reading, an argument worth
engaging."
--Roger Lundin, author of From Nature to Experience: The American
Search for Cultural Authority and editor of Invisible
Conversations: Religion in the Literature of America
"Recommended."
--CHOICE "With its revealing, ably researched focus on the
subsurface 'Christian roots' of American nature writing, Jeffrey
Bilbro's analysis of four noteworthy writers is a welcome
contribution to the growing body of ecocritical literary
commentary. Admirers of Wendell Berry will find Bilbro's account of
that author's ecological vision in later writings, including the
novel Jayber Crow, particularly illuminating."
--John Gatta, author of Making Nature Sacred: Literature, Religion,
and Environment in America from the Puritans to the Present and
American Madonna: Images of the Divine Woman in Literary
Culture
"Running deep in the American religious psyche, according to
Jeffrey Bilbro, is a kind of environmental schizophrenia, a
profound ambivalence that has led us to protect and celebrate
wilderness areas while simultaneously fueling the ambition to
'redeem' untamed nature by transforming it into a material sign of
God's favor. Despite Lynn White's claim that only a religious
solution to an essentially religious problem like American
environmental degradation will serve us, religious ideas in
contemporary environmental thought remain largely untreated or
ignored by scholars. By demonstrating how some of our most
important and innovative Christian environmental thinkers--Thoreau,
Muir, Cather, and Berry--have navigated this ambivalence and
managed to recover a Christian ethic of holistic and ecologically
grounded protection of the environment, Bilbro's Loving God's
Wildness provides American religious thought with an indispensable
roadmap toward a more sane and clear-headed embrace of
environmental stewardship."
--George Handley, author of Home Waters: A Year of Recompenses on
the Provo River and coeditor of Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures
of the Environment
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