Suchergebnisse

Abstract
Any course in religion and ecology can include some discussion of foundational texts, including a critical reading of the literary portrayal of other-than-humans. This article will focus on teaching scriptures and ecology as illustrated in a course entitled "The Bible and the Environment," which introduces students to an ecojustice reading of the Christian Bible and secondary sources. The article also concerns my adaptation of Felder and Brent's recommendations for encouraging students to actively engage in class discussion. Since I wanted to introduce more written reflection, I adapted their methods to giving pop quizzes at the beginning, middle, and end of some class sessions. This proved successful in that students were better prepared for class, were more attentive participants in class discussion, and had better comprehension of content, including the ability to apply the concepts of anthropocentrism and ecocentrism to primary and secondary sources.

The doctrine of biblical inspiration is the view that the Holy Spirit inspired the writing of the sacred texts so that the resultant Scripture is the word of God. To say that Scripture is "God-breathed" does not mean that the scrolls fell down from the sky. Inspiration, in this sense, is the supernatural force that moved the sacred writers to transmit what God has revealed using, human language. How does one understand the Bible as the inspired word of God despite the apparent and sometimes manifest inconsistencies that one finds in the Scriptures? Does inspiration imply divine dictation, as taught by the Augustinian school of thought? Is the Bible purely a product of human ingenuity as held by some humanists? Or are we dealing with a confluence of divine will and human ability? This is the problem that this article intends to address. This will be done by applying an exegetical study of the relevant Scriptural passages dealing on this subject.