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