About
Animals & Religion
Religious Traditions & Animals
Animals & Religion examines how major religious traditions understand and relate to nonhuman animals. Across cultures and histories, these teachings shape how humans perceive and treat other beings—sometimes with care, sometimes in tension with their own ethical foundations.
Exploring Sacred Texts
The project engages sacred texts, theological interpretations, and lived practices in each tradition. Through careful study, it brings forward a consistent ethical thread—one that calls for respect and kindness toward animals—grounded in foundational texts and teachings across religions.
A Living System
Animals & Religion operates through three interconnected layers: a structured digital platform, a network of Ambassadors working within their own traditions and communities, and a growing body of teaching resources. Together, these connect research, lived experience, and shared learning, enabling these ethical foundations to be examined, communicated, and applied.
From Teaching to Life
By placing these teachings in relation to contemporary realities, the project highlights their implications for how animals are treated today. This invites a reconsideration of the widespread assumption that religion sanctions harm to animals, showing instead how all major religious traditions affirm respect, responsibility, and care toward animals.
five
interconnected
Topics
Across faiths, Animals & Religion examines:
Teachings
Foundational teachings concerning animals and moral responsibility.
Narratives
Narratives in which animals shape religious imagination and ethical reflection.
Tension
Moments of tension between enduring teachings and contemporary practice.
Living
Religious perspectives on diet, moral responsibility, and the treatment of animals.
Advocacy
How faith traditions inspire social and political engagement on behalf of the vulnerable.
A Growing Initiative
Christianity is the first fully developed religion on the platform. Its content is organized across five chapters — Teachings, Narratives, Tension, Living, and Advocacy — and is now being deepened with a blog, ambassador engagement, and community teaching resources including sermon guides.
This model will be replicated across all nine religions featured on the platform. Judaism is in active development and coming next.
Each religion follows the same architecture, allowing the project to scale with coherence and depth — building over time into a comprehensive, living resource across the world's major faith traditions.
The platform will also expand linguistically. Priority languages include Spanish, Arabic, and Hebrew, with further languages to follow as the project grows.
For Different Callings
For Advocates
Those working to reduce animal suffering often encounter religious questions or objections. Animals & Religion provides grounded, text-centered analysis to support respectful dialogue and thoughtful engagement with faith communities.
FOR RELIGIOUS LEADERS & TEACHERS
Clergy, educators, and community leaders shape moral imagination and communal life. By returning to foundational teachings across traditions, this project supports leaders in examining how enduring religious ethics speak to modern systems that affect animals and the natural world.
FOR PEOPLE OF FAITH
Many believers seek deeper alignment with the ethical foundations of their tradition. This website offers careful engagement with sacred texts, inviting reflection on how teachings of compassion, justice, stewardship, and humility may inform contemporary treatment of animals.
For Scholars & Students
Researchers and students of religion will find text-centered analysis, comparative study across traditions, and sustained engagement with ethical themes that illuminate the relationship between doctrine, narrative, and lived practice.
Shared Moral Ground
Religious traditions, scholars, and advocates do not always approach questions of animal ethics from the same starting point. Yet when sacred teachings are examined carefully, a shared moral language emerges—grounded in compassion, justice, humility, and care for the vulnerable. Taken seriously, these principles offer a durable foundation for thoughtful dialogue and responsible moral action across communities.
Our Vision
We envision a world where no animal suffers in the name of religion.
OUR Mission
We present a consistent ethical thread in sacred texts that calls for respect and kindness toward animals and connect it to contemporary life.
Through study and engagement across communities, we support reflection and change in how animals are understood and treated.
Our Team
Dr. Lisa Kemmerer
Founder & Intellectual Lead
Lisa Kemmerer is a Professor Emeritus, scholar, and activist whose work has shaped the field of animal ethics across across religions and ethics. Over more than two decades of university teaching and research, she conducted fieldwork across South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia, and has lectured internationally including in India, Brazil, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, and beyond. Her published books include Animals and World Religions, Animals and Christianity, Animals and Judaism, and Vegan Ethics: AMORE, among many others. She is the founder and director of Tapestry, the nonprofit within which Animals & Religion is developed and sustained.
Director
Adi Levy
Adi Levy is a strategist and designer whose work spans social impact, content architecture, and community building. Beginning with Lisa Kemmerer's body of scholarship, he developed Animals & Religion into a structured, multi-layered platform — shaping its strategic vision, content architecture, navigation logic, and visual identity. He directs the project and continues to lead its growth and expansion through his studio, VAZA.