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People have long looked to nature and the divine as paths to the good. In this panoramic meditation on the harmonious life, Michael Mayerfeld Bell traces how these two paths came to be seen as separate from human ways, and how many of today´s conflicts can be traced back thoUSnds of years to this ancient divide. Taking readers on a spellbinding journey through history and across the globe, Bell begins with the pagan view, which sees nature and the divine as entangled with the human - and not necessarily good. But the emergence of urban societies gave rise to new moral concerns about the political character of human life. Wealth and inequality grew, and urban people sought to justify their passions. In the face of such concerns, nature and the divine came to be partitioned from the human, and therefore seen to be good - but they also became absolute and divisive.

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"This is a superb work of scholarship and wise insight. Bell asks important questions for this troubled age: How shall we live? Where can we find truth? How can we best steward the world for all its inhabitants?"--Jules Pretty, author of The Edge of Extinction: Travels with Enduring People in Vanishing Lands

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Michael Mayerfeld Bell is Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Community and Environmental Sociology at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, where he is also a faculty associate in religious studies, environmental studies, and agroecology. His many books include the award-winning Farming for Us All: Practical Agriculture and the Cultivation of Sustainability and Childerley: Nature and Morality in a Country Village.

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