Sarah McFarland Taylor
 Associate Professor of Religion
Office: Crowe Hall, 1860 Campus Drive, 4-144
Phone: (847) 491-4361
E-mail: sarah@northwestern.edu
* On Research Leave in 2008-2009
Sarah McFarland Taylor is an associate professor of Religious Studies, specializing in the study of religion and American culture, religion and ecology, and women’s studies in religion. She holds a Bachelor's degree from Brown University, a Master's degree from Dartmouth College, and earned her doctorate in Religion and American Culture (with additional Ph.D. emphasis in Women's Studies) from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Taylor has held an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, a Louisville Institute Fellowship, a Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Fellowship, a Wabash Center Fellowship, a Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation Career Enhancement Fellowship, and was selected as one of the Indiana University Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture’s “Young Scholars in American Religion.” She has received a Joseph H. Fichter Award for the study of Women and Religion, the Albert C. Clark Prize for her work on African American religions, and a research award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. In the 2008-2009 year, she will hold the position of Senior Research Fellow at the Martin Marty Center Institute for the Advanced Study of Religion at the University of Chicago.
Her first book, Green Sisters: A Spiritual Ecology (published by Harvard University Press in April 2007), is the winner of the Catholic Press Association’s First Prize for Best Book on Gender Issues and also the Association’s First Prize for Best Book on Social Concerns. Green Sisters documents the growing movement of environmentally activist Roman Catholic religious sisters in North America. In this book, Taylor challenges received notions of “liberal” and “conservative” in American Catholic historiography and offers a new understanding of how “tradition” itself works. Taylor crafted Green Sisters as both historical anthropology and anthropological history, specifically exploring in her work the development of the methodology of historical ethnography in American religious studies.
Taylor has published journal articles on various topics related to the "greening" of American religion – from eco-erotic imagery in the work of Mormon naturalist Terry Tempest Williams to original research conducted on Eco-Churches, animal blessings, and the "Gaian Mass." Her work has been reprinted in Roger Gottlieb's anthology, This Sacred Earth: Religion, Nature, Environment (Routledge, 2nd ed., 2004), and also appears in The Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature (Continuum 2005).
In "What If Religions Had Ecologies?: The Case for Reinhabiting Religious Studies" (Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture, Summer 2007), Taylor argues that meaningful connections need to be forged between the literary realm of ecocriticism and religious studies, and more attention needs to be paid to the natural history of the physical environments that religious communities inhabit and to how those communities shape and are in turn shaped by those environments. When physical environments are considered as integral parts of academic religious inquiry and no longer rendered invisible or relegated to mere ‘backdrops’ for the larger human drama, contends Taylor, scholars will be able to provide a more nuanced sense of religion as it is truly lived in context.
Taylor's second book project, Eternally Green: American Religion and the Ecology of Death (under contract with University of California Press), deals with the religious dimensions of the "green burial movement" (ecologically friendly death planning which promotes low-impact, environmentally sound ways to "recycle" human remains). She is also in the midst of research for a third book, Eco-Prophecy: Religious Responses to Global Climate Change, in which she examines the emergence (within diverse religious and ethnic communities) of prayers, meditations, and rituals specifically directed toward climate crisis and its impact on life communities both now and in the future. Taylor explores the prophetic nature of these spiritual responses for what they might reveal about contemporary religious understandings of environmental problems and interactions between religious communities and the culture of American environmentalism, while analyzing the ways that such prayerwork and ritual performances do or do not (as the case may be) get coupled with direct political action.
This year, Taylor will join the Editorial Board for the Journal of the American Academy of Religion. She has previously served as national co-chair of the Religion and Ecology section of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) and is the founder and former chair of the "Religion, Ecology, and Culture" section of the Midwest region of the AAR. She has also chaired the AAR's Religion and Popular Culture section at the national level. The Regionally Elected Director for AAR’s Midwest region and a member of AAR’s national Board of Directors, Taylor heads the AAR’s Sustainability Task Force, a group that works to reduce the Academy’s ecological “footprint.”
Professor Taylor’s courses focus on aspects of American religion and culture and explore various understandings of the category of religion as it relates to ethnicity, women's experiences, and the natural environment. Passionate about her subject, Taylor is committed to undergraduate teaching and to interactions with students. She has published several articles on pedagogy in national journals, participated in multiple teaching forums, and completed a fellowship in a two-year teaching workshop sponsored by the Wabash Center. She believes in cultivating student participation and in the use of diverse multimedia teaching tools that engage both visual and aural learners. Taylor is committed to making each course she teaches an exciting collaborative intellectual journey.
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