As its title suggests, Jerome Stone's recent book assesses the possibilities of using religious naturalism to rediscover the sacredness of nature with the goal of ameliorating environmental degradation. To this end, Stone reformulates foundational religious concepts, mainly from the Christian thought world, in light of the inherent value and worth of nature.

Stone's introductory chapter on religious naturalism is followed by seven chapters that assess the current approaches of prominent religious naturalists while also building an original argument. These chapters are organized around concepts that are integral to environmental and religious thought: sacredness, perception, God language, materiality and spirituality, feminine aspects of divinity, learning from indigenous peoples, and the importance of entering public discourse. Such a project involves engaging existing ideas of “nature” and “the sacred” while also building a constructive argument. Thus, each chapter moves from Stone's definitions of important concepts to the contextual and scholarly history of those concepts, highlighting their limits and his productive revision of them. As he contextualizes concepts, Stone also puts the reader in conversation with well‐known and emerging thinkers in the fields of theology, ethics, religion and science, and environmental thought.

While Sacred Nature can be read as an exploration of religious naturalism's potential to address our current environmental problems, it is also a subtle argument for adopting religious naturalism due to this potential. This case is made most convincingly in the final chapter, which advocates for a public ecotheology built on religious naturalism. A naturalistic public theology would revise traditional religious symbols in order to capture the inherent value and worth of nature; that is, it would use the rhetorical form and motivational structure of religious symbols while at the same time revising their traditional content to explicitly include nature in the sacredness that the symbols point to. On Stone's account, naturalistic public theology is beneficial because it strikes a balance between more confessional public theologies, which only speak to religious insiders, and secular ideologies, which fail to harness the power of religious symbols. In effect, secular ideologies cannot motivate adherents for the long haul due to their symbolic impotence. A naturalistic public theology would speak to the religious and non‐religious alike on the basis of the value of nature. Among the list of exemplary naturalistic public theologians are Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, and Paul and Anne Ehrlich. These are not thinkers that many in religious studies would classify as theologians, but they engage in public discourse on environmental degradation using religious symbols to communicate the value of nature. They are indeed the models of the public theologians who are needed at this present moment, and Stone's book is a needed introduction to the molding of such minds.

Stone's clear writing and organization of ideas bears the marks of a long‐time educator, making this book appropriate for undergraduate and graduate students alike. Pedagogically, the book would be best paired with pieces that explore value theory thoroughly and philosophically, such as short essays by Holmes Rolston, in order to highlight the ingenuity and creativity of Stone's revision of the concept of the “sacred” to signal and symbolize that value.