Nature, Technology and the Sacred

‘This book will be an obligatory reference point for those wishing to locate the contemporary debates about how we should live with technology and nature within the longer scope of Western history.’
Ulrich Beck, Ludwig-Maximilian University, Munich

‘Szerszynski draws on several centuries of Western religious and philosophical thought to rebut the idea that modernity’s love affair with technology has taken the sacred out of nature. His provocative, wide-ranging study will broaden the horizons of environmental scholarship as well as science and technology studies.’
Sheila Jasanoff, Harvard University

‘This book will stand for many years to come as the authoritative treatment of a topic which in turn stands at the very centre of the entire ecological debate.’
John Milbank, University of Nottingham

This provocative and timely book argues that contemporary ideas and practices concerning nature and technology remain closely bound up with religious ways of thinking and acting. Using examples from North America, Europe and elsewhere, it reinterprets a range of ‘secular’ phenomena in terms of their conditioning by a complex series of transformations of the sacred in Western history. The contemporary practices of environmental politics, technological risk behaviour, alternative medicine, vegetarianism and ethical consumption take on new significance as sites of struggle between different sacral orderings.

Nature, Technology and the Sacred introduces a radically new direction for today’s critical discourse concerning nature and technology – one that reinstates it as a moment within the ongoing religious history of the West.