ABOUT ME
I was born and mostly raised in southern California. As a child I spent time switching between the suburban landscapes there and one of the largest continuous tracts of undeveloped conifer forests in northern California. My early love of nature combined with the rapid development I witnessed in southern California led me to pursue a degree in Environmental Studies at Dartmouth (B.A., 2002). For the next four years I lived mostly in New Mexico, where I became fascinated by the unique combinations of spirituality and environmental concern that I encountered there. Eager to study this phenomena from an academic perspective, I enrolled in an innovative new graduate degree program at the University of Florida whose central theme was "Religion and Nature." With the help of a strong, interdisciplinary group of scholars, I completed my PhD and joined the eccentric community of scholars studying "Religion, Nature and Culture." While my disciplinary home is in Religious Studies, I frequently collaborate with scholars in other disciplines, and believe that cross-disciplinary collaborations are vital to environmental research.
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RESEARCH INTERESTS
EDUCATION
I study how religious beliefs and practices shape climate politics. My current book project explores the intersection of Christian nationalism and anti-environmentalism in the United States.
My first book, The Gospel of Climate Skepticism, tackles the assumption that the high levels of climate change skepticism among American evangelical Christians result primarily from their theology or are a side effect of their conservative politics. I argue that social processes have been essential in establishing skepticism as the normative view within conservative evangelical circles.
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Recent interdisciplinary collaborations have involved examining cross-national differences in the environmental attitudes of conservative Protestants, and identifying gaps in research on US evangelicalism and climate change. I have also explored the religion-climate change nexus via the co-edited book How the World's Religions are Responding to Climate Change (with two wonderful scholars, Andrew Szasz and Randolph Haluza-DeLay) and a special issue on religions and climate change in the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture.
2008 - 2014
University of Florida
PhD in Religious Studies, "Religion and Nature,"
NSF-IGERT Fellow, AMW3
2006 - 2008
University of Florida
M.A. in Religious Studies, "Religion and Nature"
1998 - 2002
Dartmouth College
B.A., Environmental Studies, magna cum laude