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Sidney Blankenship

8th April 2017

is an independent scholar and life-long resident of the southern grasslands of central North America, where he has restored a herd of American bison and lived with many other animals under the authority of the USDA Animal Welfare Act and the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. His degrees are from Abilene Christian (Texas), BA in Bible and Greek (1966); one year of Divinity School at Edinburgh, Scotland (1967); and Oxford University, BA and MA in Theology (1969, 1974). Primary academic interests involve animal ethics from Native America and religious perspectives drawn mainly from Jewish and Christian theology. Published works include “Native American Religion: Restoring Species to the Circle of Life,” in the Routledge Handbook of Religion and Animal Ethics (Linzey and Linzey, eds., 2019), “Ecological Hermeneutics and Native American Ethics,” in Christina Nellist, ed., Climate Crisis and Creation Care (Cambridge Scholars, 2021), and “Corpse ‘Contamination’ as a Religious Approach to Fur” in The Ethics of Fur (Linzey and Linzey, eds,) forthcoming from Lexington. Several presentations have been made on these subjects for the OCAE Summer Schools since 2016. Unpublished works include “Animals and Culture” (Warwick University, 1994) for the International Research Network for Environment and Society and “Wolves in the Bible as Shaping Human Perception,” for the International Wolf Symposium (Duluth, MN, 2018) A decades-long research project culminating in a book on the Animals of Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14 has been prepared for publication, as well as detailed research for a Concordance of Biblical Animals.