Just Download and Install the Plug-in once, no future download required. Carver T. Yu Vice President, China Graduate School of Theology Anthropocentrism has been recognized as the root of our ecological crisis. Lynn White, Jr. and Arnold Toynbee point their fingers at Christianity as the source of the problem. The Creation story in the Bible, they maintain, provides a perception of man which gives shape to a culture oriented to the conquest of nature.
Many environmentalists take in such an interpretation of history to the detriment of their cause.
They are misled to look in the wrong direction. The real source of the problem is the cultural project in the West engendered by the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment portraits man as the ego-subject endowed with rationality and absolute freedom. Narcissism of the self is the hallmark of modern culture. The ideal of individual freedom and scientistic rationality coincides with the process of radical secularization which desacralizes nature as well as the development of a malignant type of capitalism which uproots the sense of covenantal commitment intrinsic to human existence.