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This essay discusses three recent books which each offer an integrative account of religious ethics and the environment. Religious environmental ethics is an area of inquiry within the larger field of religion and ecology. After a narrative that contextualizes the development of religious environmental ethics in relation to the environmental social movement, I describe the formation of the field including its focus on worldview, the 'cosmological turn,' and its engagement with science, the 'cosmic turn.' Elizabeth Johnson exemplifies the cosmic turn by developing a Christian theology of life in nature which explicitly accepts Darwin's theory of evolution. Willis Jenkins advocates a prophetic pragmatism and critiques a focus on worldview that is abstracted from practice and defers moral responsibility. Larry Rasmussen joins analysis of worldview with reflection on cross-cultural resources for 'anticipatory communities' of moral formation to catalyze change. I argue with Rasmussen that religious environmental ethics needs multiple approaches and should allow room for methodological pluralism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT This article reviews Hans Kelsen's mysterious and recently published last book, contextualizing it with reference to the little known dialogue between Kelsen and Eric Voegelin. The confrontation between Kelsen and Voegelin, two of the most illustrious émigré scholars who found a new home in America, is important to revisit because it touches upon several axes of debate of crucial importance to postwar intellectual history: the religion-secularity debate, the positivist-antipositivist debates, and the controversy that also led to the famous Voegelin-Arendt debate: how to read the horrors of totalitarianism into a historical trajectory of modernity. Although the Kelsen-Voegelin exchange ended in failure and bitterness, its substance goes to the heart of modern intellectual history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]