Biography
Erin Hardnett received her Bachelor's of Arts from Vanderbilt University in English, Economics, and African American and Diaspora Studies. She now attends Yale Divinity School where she is pursuing her Master's of Arts in Religion with a concentration in Religions in the African Diaspora. Her current research interest is the intersection of African American spiritual practices and the natural environment. She hopes to further explore how the natural environment may have historically performed as a liberative space for African Americans.
Paper Abstract
African Americans are frequently absent from discussions of the natural environment except in discourse around environmental injustice. This paper seeks to better understand the significance the natural environment has played in the spiritual practices of African Americans and serves as a small corrective asserting that the natural environment plays a larger role in African Americans' historical life outside of environmental racism. Through a genealogy of Christianity's perception of the body and the earth, which moves from cartesian dualism to the doctrine of discovery, the study argues that a bifurcation exists between Christians and the earth. Nevertheless, this separation is mediated historically in African Americans' religious practice by the Black Church's conception in the woods and the wilderness' role in Black fugitivity. Ultimately it asserts that there is a current and historical eschatological imperative for African Americans to enter the natural environment to explore different modes of meaning-making and otherwise positionalities.