Nancy Menning

Nancy Menning

Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy and Religion
Faculty, School of Humanities and Sciences

Specialty:Religion & Ecology
Phone:(607) 274-5802
E-mail:nmenning@ithaca.edu
Office:234 Roy H Park Hall
Ithaca, NY 14850

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

Ongoing (Spring 2013): 

  • World Religions: Western and Modern
  • Religious Cosmologies
  • Character: Making Habits for Good (ICIC mini-course)

Past:

  • Death and the Soul (Ithaca Seminar; Fall 2012)
  • Islam (Fall 2010 & Fall 2012)
  • Indigenous Religious Traditions (Fall 2012)
  • Death & Immortality (Fall 2010 & Fall 2011)
  • World Religions: Western and Modern (Spring 2011 & Spring 2012)
  • Mormonism in the American Imagination (Spring 2012)
  • Religion & Nature (Spring 2011)
  • Religion & Criminal Justice (Fall 2011)
  • Edges and Interfaces: Defining and Transcending Boundaries (ICIC "Insight" mini-course; Spring 2012)

Upcoming (Fall 2013):

  • Death of Nature: Mourning Environmental Losses (Ithaca Seminar)
  • Death & Immortality

Other courses in development:

  • Creation Narratives in Religion and Science
  • Spiritual but not Religious: Human Quests for Meaning

 

Active Research Projects

  • Killing grief: Religious perspectives on environmental mourning (book chapter)
  • Robert Adams, the Edenic narrative, and the religious imagination (journal article)
  • Quantum religion: Teaching cosmologies in the religious studies classroom (journal article)

 

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