1. Converting to Flourishing: Eco-halal and Eco-Buddhist Farming in Conversation

Tasting Religion - Aldea Mulhern

Sarah E. Robinson [+-]
Pacific Lutheran University and Santa Clara University
Sarah E. Robinson, also Robinson-Bertoni, is a scholar of religion, ethics, environment, and food. She researches sustainable agriculture in religious contexts. She has served as a professor for over six years at Pacific Lutheran University, Santa Clara University, and Dominican University of CA, teaching courses in environmental studies, first-year writing, women’s and gender studies, and religion. Robinson serves in the Steering Committee for the Religion and Food unit of the American Academy of Religion. She serves also as a Board Member-at-Large for the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture. For the American Academy of Religion, Western Region, she has been conference manager, Women’s Caucus liaison to the Board, Regional Student Director to the national-level Student Committee, and unit chair for Ecology and Religion, Graduate Student Professional Development, and Women and Religion. Her writing appears in the Springer Encyclopedia of Food and Agricultural Ethics; Columbia University Press’ Religion, Food, and Eating in North America; Oxford University Press’ Flourishing: Comparative Religious Environmental Ethics; Routledge’s Key Thinkers on the Environment; and the journal Religions and the Journal of Feminist Theology. She co-edited the 2021 volume Valuing Lives, Healing Earth: Religion, Gender, and Life on Earth, highlighting global women striving for community health and religious integrity in justice seeking ways. She continues to research, write, present, and publish, while focusing on work as Advocacy Manager for Earth Ministry/Washington Interfaith Power and Light.

Description

Recognizing the need for sustainability—a cyclical notion of continual replenishment of natural systems, including human communities, toward mutual flourishing—can be described as a conversion experience, renewing ethical and practical commitments. Converts to agricultural sustainability often recover the notion of inherent value in the beasts, birds, bees, flowers, and food plants, a range of beings morally sublimated in industrial systems where monetary value dominates the agricultural landscape. The author’s U.S.-based case studies display Muslim and Buddhist sustainable agricultural practices highlighting ethically integrated relationships of care, offering a social, economic, and environmental alternative to exploitative industrial agriculture. In Chicago, Taqwa Eco-food Cooperative (2002-2009) provided locally and sustainably produced halal meat, permissible for Muslims. Taqwa leaders educated on integrating ethics with food practice, emphasizing tayyib, or wholesomeness. Taqwa combined ethical reflection with practice improving the health of consumers, lives of animals, livelihoods of farmers, as well as the Muslim prayerful tradition of slaughter, not undertaken lightly. Green Gulch Farm is a part of the San Francisco Zen Center (SFZC), which was founded in 1962. Managers and apprentices cultivate several acres facing the Pacific Ocean, producing vegetables for farmer’s markets, local restaurants, and for the SFZC community. In interviews, leaders reflected on sustainable farming and the Buddhist concept of dependent co-arising, dynamic interdependence. Each case study represents a unique context in time, place, and social location, which affords both a strong critique of industrial agriculture and a local-scale alternative designed for mutual flourishing. The case studies demonstrate sustainable, local, religiously oriented projects, producing viable alternatives for food production and distribution. The religious notions of dependent co-arising and tayyib socially support sustainable conversions to concretely care for people, land, water, agricultural ecosystems, and other-than-human living beings eaten as food.

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Citation

Robinson-Bertoni, Sarah. 1. Converting to Flourishing: Eco-halal and Eco-Buddhist Farming in Conversation. Tasting Religion. Equinox eBooks Publishing, United Kingdom. Feb 2026. ISBN 9781000000000. https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/view-chapter/?id=44084. Date accessed: 11 Dec 2024 doi: 10.1558/equinox.44084. Feb 2026

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