Brief Biography
Nancy Menning is Assistant Professor of World Religions. Her dissertation, Reading Nature Religiously: Lectio Divina, Environmental Ethics, and the Literary Nonfiction of Terry Tempest Williams (U of Iowa, 2010), articulated a process of reading nature religiously (adapted from the spiritual reading practice of lectio divina) that can serve as the foundation for an ethical relationship with the more-than-human world. In addition to her work in religious studies, Nancy has an academic and professional background in forestry and environmental studies. She is also a certified instructor in the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program (insideoutcenter.org).
Teaching
Past:
- Death & Immortality (Fall 2010 & Fall 2011)
- Islam (Fall 2010)
- World Religions: Western and Modern (Spring 2011)
- Religion & Nature (Spring 2011)
- Religion & Criminal Justice (Fall 2011)
In progress (Spring 2012):
- World Religions: Western and Modern
- Mormonism in the American Imagination
- Edges and Interfaces: Defining and Transcending Boundaries
Intended (Fall 2012):
- Imagining the Soul: Death in the World Religions
- Islam
- Indigenous Religious Traditions
Other courses in development:
- Creation Narratives in Religion and Science
Ongoing Research Projects
- social transformations implied by the religious command to “visit the prisoner”
- Renaissance European Wunderkammern as iconic representations of the Book of Nature
- narrating climate change as a rite of passage
- the meeting between St. Francis of Assisi and al-Malik al-Kamil in 1219, with implications for Christian-Muslim interreligious dialogue
- the religious ecology of Mormon Utah in the writings of Brigham Young, Wallace Stegner, and Terry Tempest Williams
- interpreting 21st century urban deer management programs through the lens of religious beliefs about deer and venison
- grieving environmental losses


