In Communion with God's Sparrow: Incorporating Animal Agency into the Environmental Vision of Laudato Sí

Although a conventional environmentalism focuses on the health of ecological systems, Pope Francis's 2015 environmental encyclical Laudato Sí invokes St. Francis of Assisi to emphasize God's love for the individual organism, no matter how small. Decrying the tendency to regard other creatu...

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Détails bibliographiques
Auteur principal: Ashley, Mary A. (Auteur)
Type de support: Électronique Article
Langue:Anglais
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Publié: Springer Netherlands [2018]
Dans: Sophia
Année: 2018, Volume: 57, Numéro: 1, Pages: 103-118
RelBib Classification:KAJ Époque contemporaine
KDB Église catholique romaine
NBD Création
NCG Éthique de la création; Éthique environnementale
VA Philosophie
Sujets non-standardisés:B Agency
B Catholic
B Franciscan
B Kenneth J. Shapiro
B Merleau-Ponty
B Laudato Sí
B Phenomenology
B Telic naturalism
B Kinesthetic empathy
B Pope Francis
B Alasdair MacIntyre
B Communion
B Animal
B Pope Benedict XVI
B Nonmaleficence
B Saint Francis of Assisi
Accès en ligne: Volltext (Verlag)
Description
Résumé:Although a conventional environmentalism focuses on the health of ecological systems, Pope Francis's 2015 environmental encyclical Laudato Sí invokes St. Francis of Assisi to emphasize God's love for the individual organism, no matter how small. Decrying the tendency to regard other creatures as mere objects to be controlled and used, Pope Francis urges our enactment of a ‘universal communion' governed by love. I suggest, however, that Laudato Sí's animal ethic, as focused on ordering human and animal need, is inadequate to its overarching vision of cross-species communion. This vision requires the sort of cross-species relational bridge implicit in Maurice Merleau-Ponty's view of agency as an irreducibly ‘animate' expression of choice and afforded further definition in Kenneth J. Shapiro's conception of a ‘kinesthetic empathy.' As the phenomenological epistemology underlying both discourses makes possible a rough correspondence, I put these in conversation to demonstrate that a Merleau-Pontyan and reciprocal agency is a constitutive aspect of the fullest sort of cross-species relation, such that recognition of this agency can both deepen our understanding of ‘universal communion' and foster engagement in its practice.
ISSN:1873-930X
Contient:Enthalten in: Sophia
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1007/s11841-017-0630-9