“Beauty,” “desire,” or “ravishment” would not be the first words to come to mind if most of us were asked to name the keynotes of Reformed theology. Neither would those seeking inspiration in Christian tradition toward the shaping of a present-day environmental ethic necessarily look first to John Calvin for help. Yet Belden Lane's new book, in highlighting what its subtitle calls “the surprising legacy of Reformed spirituality,” offers eloquent testimony to the viability and contemporary relevance of such an association.

Though fully informed by scholarly investigation and close scrutiny of texts, Ravished by Beauty is also a book conspicuously rooted in its author's life-experience and love of physical landscapes. So it is a book centered even more in Missouri and western Wyoming than in Geneva. Lane's purpose, described from the outset, is to draw upon centuries-old traditions of Reformed spirituality to write about “beauty and desire, the capacity of the earth to mirror God's splendor, and the importance of forging a bond between human longing and the rest of creation.” Lane aims thereby to establish “the need for solid religious underpinning of a viable environmental ethic” (2), while illustrating in his own person how someone's religious heritage can deepen his or her sense of place and spiritual linkage to particular landscapes.

It could be argued, of course, that the earth-friendly, ecstatic, aesthetically appreciative, and erotically charged aspects of Reformed spirituality that Lane brings to light qualify only as recessive rather than dominant traits within this overall tradition. But Lane effectively addresses that concern. On the one hand, he corrects common misconceptions about the environmental implications of much-maligned Calvinist tradition—pointing out, for example, that the “first modern legislation against animal cruelty was passed in Puritan Massachusetts” (32). On the other hand, he acknowledges the tradition's several defects and failures, including the ironies of Reformed piety that have sometimes in Euro-American history seen the desire for God debased into an unholy, exploitative desire for landholding. Puritanism's iconoclastic disposition (in the realm of visual if not literary art), the masculinist tenor of its systematic theology, its reluctance to recognize sacramentally the sanctification of time and space—all of these have weakened its capacity to foster an enduring creation-spirituality.

Lane demonstrates, though, how several underrated or ignored features of Reformed spirituality deserve renewed attention today. Above all, he dramatizes our present-day need to honor the Calvinist conviction of God's transcendent otherness yet connectedness to creation, its profound reverence for an undomesticated God of wild beauty. More than the anthropocentric, resource-management outlook that defines much of contemporary society's relation to the earth, this theocentric vision of a world suffused with divine glory promises to satisfy both the land's need and our own deepest desire. Lane's second chapter, devoted to “John Calvin on the World as a Theater of God's Glory,” contributes persuasively toward confirming these points, as does his treatment of Jonathan Edwards in chapter five. For Lane, knowing God to be—as today's teenager might say in consort with Calvin—“truly awesome” is a wellspring of ecological reverence and earth-care.

Yet another grace of Reformed tradition that figures significantly in this book is the value of cultivating what seventeenth-century Puritanism called “experimental religion,” in contrast to merely propositional or creedal faith. The need to testify personally to the operations of God's grace upon the heart—or the imperative to move religious truths, as Richard Baxter once said of preaching, from the head to the heart—has long been a hallmark of Reformed spirituality. It is an impulse that Lane not only describes, by way of historical examples, but also exemplifies, through the interludes of personal narrative blended into his presentation. This intermingling of scholarship and field-based reflection lends incarnational substance to the book's theoretical arguments; and it achieves memorable brilliance in sequences such as the meditation on a hundred-year-old cottonwood tree that Lane presents toward the close of chapter three.

Related to this emphasis on personal conversion, testimony is a spiritual practice known in seventeenth-century usage as “meditation on the creatures” and likewise reflected throughout Lane's book. Moreover, the contemplative and even mystical disposition thus identified within Reformed tradition complements monastic and other aspects of Catholic tradition with which Lane, who teaches at a Jesuit university, is plainly familiar.

Beyond Calvin and Edwards, writers associated with Reformed tradition who are called to witness in Ravished by Beauty include figures ranging from environmentalist John Muir, or theologians Karl Barth and Jürgen Moltmann, to the present-day poet Pattiann Rogers. One might enlarge the list to include Herman Melville, whose unorthodox though “deep-diving” religious sensibility was clearly influenced by Calvinism and whose preoccupation with nature's savagery and affliction squares with part of Lane's concern. Seventeenth-century poet Anne Bradstreet, though mentioned, also warrants fuller discussion by virtue of the ecospirituality she manifests in her long verse-meditation titled “Contemplations,” arguably the first full-scale American nature poem. And I would suggest that among the rare fiction-writers who are distinguished in our own time, who are committed Christians, and whose spirituality has been shaped by Reformed tradition, Marilynne Robinson deserves special notice. Robinson's first novel, Housekeeping, expresses a vision of creation that is richly consonant with Lane's argument, as is the sense of beauty—including the beauty of language—displayed in all her novels. One of Robinson's nonfictional volumes even includes an explicit defense of Calvinism.

But while Ravished by Beauty leaves room for further reflection on several issues that its argument will have inspired, it represents a noteworthy and strikingly original contribution to the growing body of literature devoted to “green religion.” In chapter 4, for example, Lane manages to link Trinitarian theology not only to general ecological concerns but also to the specific problem of biodiversity. Where else could one find an essay that links the current global crisis of species extinction to the Holy Trinity—an inquiry interlaced with tales of maggots in the U.S. Civil War, coyotes in present-day New Mexico, and seeds preserved by martyr-scientists in Leningrad during World War II?

As such, Ravished by Beauty is a worthy successor to Lane's previous works on ecospirituality—one of which, his Solace of Fierce Landscapes, I consider a landmark volume of its kind. This latest book, though focused on Reformed tradition, is also elegantly capacious and ecumenical in scope. Decades ago, the intellectual historian Perry Miller suggested that the seminal essence of Reformed piety lay before and beyond Calvin, in the writings of St. Augustine. And Augustine, whose evocative confession of all that it might mean to desire God remains unsurpassed, qualifies as a classic locus of convergence for Reformed and Catholic Christianity. All of this is finally to confirm that Belden Lane sets forth a compelling argument—at once ancient and new, as Augustine said of God's beauty—that while “misplaced yearning lies at the heart of the current ecological crisis” (5), godly desire can indeed be regenerative for us as well as for the earth we inhabit.