This book is drawn out of a 'Dialogue', held in Venice at the Cini Foundation in September 2010, aimed at exploring the relationship between ecology and theology. The meeting involved experts from different disciplines (theologians, anthropologists, ecologists, economists, philosophers, and historians), sharing the awareness that the gamut of passions mobilized by ecology so far has not reached the level or intensity required for the huge task facing humanity today concerning the fate of the Earth. Can religions help us tackle the ecological crisis we are now facing? Can we redefine our relationship with the Earth, giving spiritual depth to ecological issues? How to mobilize the notions, cosmologies and rituals characterizing some religious traditions without overlooking the conflicts underlying the ecological debate and the essential role of politics?

Can religions help us tackle the ecological crisis we are now facing? Can we redefine our relationship with the Earth, giving spiritual depth to ecological issues? This book attempts to answer these questions by exploring the relationship between ecology and theology.

Jacques Lacan is a seminal figure in the history of thought, whose radical contributions to thinking on subjectivity, sexuality and language are hugely influential. However, Lacan's engagements with religion – and specifically with traditions beyond the hegemonic European tradition – have not received the attention they deserve. Lacan himself translated Taoist texts, studied Maimonides' The Guide for the Perplexed and engaged with occultism, Sufism and the Kabbalistic tradition. This book offers the first in-depth exploration of his work in this area, asking: how did the different discourses on 'religion' influence Lacan's own thinking? And what can Lacanian theory offer when it comes to the study of non-European religious beliefs? Can it help us to step outside of the Western Christian framework that still organizes the academic knowledge of what religion should be? This collection critically examines how Lacan helps us to question how far the European understanding of these texts and traditions is tied to the universal drive of capitalism and to the psychological internalization of the history of colonialism.