The 1994 Cadbury Lectures at the University of Birmingham
Oxford University Press, 1996
Back Cover:
“The most comprehensive and intelligent treatment of its topic that has been written … Nasr is one of the major intellects of our day.”
Huston Smith, University of California, Berkeley
The current ecological crisis is a matter of urgent global concern, with solutions being sought on many fronts. In this book, Seyyed Hossein Nasr argues that the devastation of our world has been exacerbated, if not actually caused, by the reductionist view of nature that has been advanced by modern secular science. What is needed, he believes, is the recovery of the truth to which the great, enduring religions all attest; namely that nature is sacred.
Nasr traces the historical process through which Western civilization moved away from the idea of nature as sacred and embraced a world view which sees humans as alienated from nature and nature itself as a machine to be dominated and manipulated by humans. His goal is to negate the totalitarian claims of modern science and to re-open the way to the religious view of the order of nature, developed over centuries in the cosmologies and sacred sciences of the great traditions. Each tradition, Nasr shows, has a wealth of knowledge and experience concerning the order of nature. The resuscitation of this knowledge, he argues, would allow religions all over the globe to enrich each other and cooperate to heal the wounds inflicted upon the Earth.
About the Author:
One of the world’s leading experts on Islamic science and spirituality, Seyyed Hossein Nasr is University Professor of Islamic Studies at George Washington University. Previously, he taught at Tehran University, where he served as Dean of the Faculty of Letters and as Vice Chancellor. He was also president of Aryamehr University. In 1974 Dr. Nasr founded The Iranian Academy of Philosophy, serving as its president until he immigrated to the United States in 1979. He is author of numerous books, including Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis of Modern Man (1989) and Knowledge and the Sacred (1989).
Jan Olof Bengtsson 