Love thy Nature:an ethnography of eco-theological efforts within the Danish Church

This paper is about attempts made by environmentally concerned pastors within the Danish People’s Church to articulate a so-called “eco-theology” fit for a time of climate crisis. In the paper, I describe how re-describing the God-world relation as one marked by ‘deep incarnation’ enables the pastors to establish the grounds for extending the commandment to love one’s neighbor to also encompass non-human others. I argue that as the pastors are trying to bring the world and God, the human and the nonhuman closer together, in order to, ultimately, enact Christian love, they are dealing with a problem that pertain to discerning and articulating the right relational configuration, or, as I suggest calling it, the optimal distance, for care. A problem, I suggest, that is also at the locus of anthropology in regard to what kind of relation ought to be between the anthropologist and her Others (Robbins 2013) - including nonhuman ones. Through a contrapuntal reading (Reinhardt 2015) of eco-theological and anthropological engagements with human-nonhuman relations, the paper draws attention to how both these intellectual traditions entail engaging with the question of what makes up a relation of care and how such a relation hinges on calibrating the optimal distance between the subject and object of care.