Law Commons^™

This 1995 Times Literary Supplement essay examines two books on the underlying philosophies of the ecology and environmentalism movements. The first, by Sorbonne professor and lately French Minister of Culture Luc Ferry, offers a critique of ecological philosophies that seek to de-privilege humanity in favor of a larger conception of nature. Ferry writes in a breezy, witty style which has at its aim reasserting liberal humanism and its human-centered ethic as against any ethic that treats human beings as merely species or merely thing within nature. The review argues that Ferry goes over the top in making his case, however, …

This 1995 Times Literary Supplement (London) review examines John L. Brooke's impressive The Refiner's Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology 1644-1844. Brooke argues against long prevailing scholarship that, on the one hand, views Mormon theology as genuinely American and, on the other hand, understands it purely functionally - without regard for its theological content, but instead as a function of social pressures on impoverished populations in upstate New York from whence came Joseph Smith. The former view is incorrect, Brooke says, because the roots of Mormon theology lie in Europe in gnostic and splinters of the "radical reformation" that lay …