AVATAR AND NATURE SPIRITUALITY
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Part I:  BRINGING AVATAR INTO FOCUS

Prologue: Avatar as Rorschach
Bron Taylor

Introduction: The Religion and Politics of Avatar
Bron Taylor

Avatar: Ecorealism and the Blockbuster Melodrama
Stephen Rust

Outer Space Religion and the Ambiguous Nature of Avatar’s Pandora
Thore Bjørnvig

PART II: POPULAR RESPONSES

Avatar Fandom, Environmentalism, and Nature Religion
Britt Istoft

Post-Pandoran Depression or Na’vi Sympathy: Avatar, Affect, and Audience Reception
Matthew Holtmeier

Transposing the Conversation into Popular Idiom: The Reaction to Avatar in Hawai’i
Rachelle K. Gould, Nicole M. Ardoin, and Jennifer Kamakanipakolonahe’okekai Hashimoto

Watching Avatar from “AvaTar Sands” Land
Randolph Haluza-DeLay, Michael P. Ferber, and Tim Wiebe-Neufeld

PART III: CRITICAL, EMOTIONAL & SPIRITUAL REFLECTIONS

Becoming the “Noble Savage”: Nature Religion and the “Other” in Avatar
Chris Klassen

The Na’vi as Spiritual Hunters: A Semiotic Exploration
Pat Munday

Calling the Na’vi: Evolutionary Jungian Psychology and Nature Spirits
Bruce MacLennan

Avatar and Artemis: Indigenous Narratives as Neo-Romantic Environmental Ethics
Joy H. Greenberg

Spirituality and Resistance: Avatar and Ursula Le Guin’s The Word for World Is Forest
David Landis Barnhill

I See You: Interspecies Empathy and Avatar
Lisa H. Sideris

Knowing Pandora in Sound: Acoustemology and Ecomusicological Imagination in Cameron’s Avatar
Michael B. MacDonald

Works of Doubt and Leaps of Faith: An Augustinian Challenge to Planetary Resilience
Jacob von Heland and Sverker Sörlin

Epilogue: Truth and Fiction in Avatar’s Cosmogony and Nature Religion
Bron Taylor

Afterword: Considering the Legacies of Avatar
Daniel Heath Justice

Contributors

Index