Weather, Religion and Climate Change

Weather, Religion and Climate Change is the first in-depth exploration of the fascinating way in which the weather impacts on the fields of religion, art, culture, history, science, and architecture. In critical dialogue with meteorology and climate science, this book takes the reader beyond the limits of contemporary thinking about the Anthropocene and explores whether a deeper awareness of weather might impact on the relationship between nature and self. Drawing on a wide range of examples, including paintings by J.M.W. Turner, medieval sacred architecture, and Aristotle’s classical Meteorologica, Bergmann examines a geographically and historically wide range of cultural practices, religious practices, and worldviews in which weather appears as a central, sacred force of life. He also examines the history of scientific meteorology and its ambivalent commodification today, as well as medieval "weather witchery" and biblical perceptions of weather as a kind of "barometer" of God’s love. Overall, this volume explores the notion that a new awareness of weather and its atmospheres can serve as a deep cultural and spiritual driving force that can overcome the limits of the Anthropocene and open a new path to the "Ecocene", the age of nature. Drawing on methodologies from religious studies, cultural studies, art history and architecture, philosophy, environmental ethics and aesthetics, history, and theology, this book will be of great interest to all those concerned with studying the environment from a transdisciplinary perspective on weather and wisdom.