This book is not about what we can teach animals, but what they can teach us. Their differences are often not as radical as most humans imagine, which is one reason we love animals. We have more neurons in our neurological systems, but we share many of the same features and underestimate what they have learned about survival strategies over the eons. We stop and think a lot more, but in doing so can sometimes interfere with natural processes and the results are not always good. Animals provide a good platform from which we should launch emotionally and even ethically if we pay attention to them. This book is unlike carefully documented scholarly articles that Dr. Thomas also writes. It is written for a wide popular audience, and is loaded with stories and humor. It is meant to be easy to read for almost anyone.

This volume examines the way in which cultural ideas about "the heavens" shape religious ideas and are shaped by them in return. Our approaches to cosmology have a profound effect on the way in which we each deal with religious questions and participate in the imaginative work of public and private world-building. Employing an interdisciplinary team of international scholars, each chapter shows how religion and cosmology interrelate and matter for real people. Historical and contemporary case studies are included to demonstrate the lived reality of a variety of faith traditions and their interactions with the cosmos. This breadth of scope allows readers to get a unique overview of how religion, science and our view of space have, and will continue to, impact our worldviews. Offering a comprehensive exploration of humanity and its relationship with cosmology, this book will be an important reference for scholars of Religion and Science, Religion and Culture, Interreligious Dialogue and Theology, as well as those interested in Science and Culture and Public Education.

A Communion of Subjects is the first comparative and interdisciplinary study of the conceptualization of animals in world religions. Scholars from a wide range of disciplines, including Thomas Berry (cultural history), Wendy Doniger (study of myth), Elizabeth Lawrence (veterinary medicine, ritual studies), Marc Bekoff (cognitive ethology), Marc Hauser (behavioral science), Steven Wise (animals and law), Peter Singer (animals and ethics), and Jane Goodall (primatology) consider how major religious traditions have incorporated animals into their belief systems, myths, rituals, and art. Their findings offer profound insights into the relationship between human beings and animals, and a deeper understanding of the social and ecological web in which we all live.

This book examines the works of major artists between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, as important barometers of individual and collective values toward non-human life. Once viewed as merely representational, these works can also be read as tangential or morally instrumental by way of formal analysis and critical theories. Chapter Two demonstrates the discrimination toward large and small felines in Genesis and The Book of Revelation. Chapter Three explores the cruel capture of free roaming animals and how artists depicted their furs, feathers and shells in costume as symbols of virtue and vice. Chapter Four identifies speciest beliefs between donkeys and horses. Chapter Five explores the altered Dutch kitchen spaces and disguised food animals in various culinary constructs in still life painting. Chapter Six explores the animal substances embedded in pigments. Chapter Seven examines animals in absentia-in the crafting of brushes. The book concludes with the fish paintings of William Merritt Chase whose glazing techniques demonstrate an artistic approach that honors fishes as sentient beings.