Animal Theologians

Many people who have thought about God have not thought about animals, or about the relationship between the two. But among those who have are some of the most celebrated religious thinkers, including Michel de Montaigne, Thomas Tryon, John Wesley, John Ruskin, Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas K. Gandhi, Albert Schweitzer, and Paul Tillich. This volume comprises 24 scholarly studies that detail challenges to the dominant anthropocentrism of most religious traditions. The editors have brought together Jewish, Unitarian, Christian, transcendentalist, Muslim, Hindu, Dissenting, deist, and Quaker voices, each offering a unique theological perspective that counters the neglect of the nonhuman. Animal Theologians is divided into three parts starting with the pioneers who first saw a relationship between animals and divinity, those who contributed to the expansion of social sensibility to animals, and ending with the work of contemporary theologians. The essays in this volume use contextual and historical background to describe what led animal theologians to their beliefs, and then pave way for further developments in this expanding field. This volume is an act of reclaiming different religious traditions for animals by recovering lost voices.

Andrew Linzey is director of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics and has been a member of the Faculty of Theology in the University of Oxford for twenty-eight years. He is a visiting professor of animal theology at the University of Winchester. He is the author or editor of more than thirty books, including Animal Theology (1994), Why Animal Suffering Matters (OUP, 2009), and The Palgrave Handbook of Practical Animal Ethics (2018). Clair Linzey is the deputy director of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics and professor of animal theology at the Graduate Theological Foundation. She is co-editor of the Journal of Animal Ethics and co-editor of the Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series. She is the author of Developing Animal Theology (2021) and has co-edited eight other books with Andrew Linzey.