The global water crisis, to which this volume responds, is increasingly urgent as more and more fresh water sources are depleted and polluted—and as the natural systems that maintain the hydrological cycle are disrupted and destroyed. As the Standing Rock Sioux put it so profoundly, “Water is life.” Other religious traditions affirm this essential truth, celebrating water under many names: living water, holy water, cleansing waters. Yet, the deep wisdom of our religious traditions that value water is not the primary focus informing our relationship to water. In Loving Water Across Religions: Contributions to an Integral Water Ethic, Elizabeth McAnally adds to the growing research addressing this crisis by proposing a renewal of human thinking and relationship to water that moves away from thinking about water as an inert resource to be exploited and, instead, sees it as “a precious source of life that deserves respect and care” (18). Methodologically, this work draws on integral ecology, which was pioneered by Thomas Berry and others, as well as “organic inquiry,” a method that integrates the personal experiences and transformations of the researcher within the overall study—in this case, of fresh water. In one sense, the text calls for a re-mythologizing or re-sacralizing of the natural world in a way that sees waters as possessing subjectivity, interiority, or sacrality in the hope that a transformed relationship with water will transform human responsibility for water.

The heart of the book considers case studies that draw on Christian, Hindu, and Buddhist traditions and have water and its significance at the center. Together, the cases offer examples of how these traditions have resources within them for serving our need to transform human relationships with water that center on the water as more than, and other than, “a mere resource.” The studies are varied and illuminate different possible religious relationships to water arising from the distinct insights and imaginations of each tradition. For Christianity, McAnally explores the practice of baptism and the sacramental consciousness undergirding much of Christian practice. From within Hinduism, she focuses on seva (loving service) given and needed by the Yamuna River. The Yamuna has its headwaters in the Himalayas and flows across northern India, through New Delhi, until it joins the Ganges. Since ancient times, the river has been sacred, the embodiment of Yamuna, the goddess of love, the beloved of Krishna, and from her abundant sacred waters healing flows. But today it is heavily damaged by dams and pollution. McAnally's Buddhist example derives from the tradition of the bodhisattva and the activities of the Seventeenth Gyalwang Karmapa Ogyen Trinley Dorje, a Tibetan Buddhist leader who has undertaken environmental conservation of the Tibetian plateau as essential to his spiritual practice (126).

McAnally's study, drawing on her organic inquiry method, succeeds in pushing the limits of traditional scientific and academic ways of understanding water and our relationship to it by pressing questions of personal transformation in relationship to the subject under study. This leads to a creative chapter on contemplative practices for engaging deeply with water that invite the reader into those transformations herself. Although readers looking for an analysis of how the living world has become desacralized will have to look elsewhere, this call for personal investment will appeal to students and others, particularly those who often already have a treasured relationship with a particular body of water. The varied ways of imagining a more intimate relationship with water, one that demands an ethical response, have transformative potential. Her concluding invitation to readers to recover insights from other traditions to widen this transformation is also welcome.