Anabaptist Environmental Ethics: A Review Essay

This article situates four decades of Anabaptist writing on environmental ethics in relationship to Laurel Kearns and Willis Jenkins’s typology of eco-justice, stewardship, and eco-spirituality. It argues that while stewardship discourse dominates the early work, it has faded in significance as Anabaptist theology increasingly appropriates varieties of eco-spirituality such as agrarianism and watershed discipleship. It concludes with a turn towards recent arguments that eco-theology, in all three varieties, has over-emphasized questions of cosmology and worldview at the expense of what Jenkins calls “prophetic pragmatism.”