Tapestry
The Animals & Religion website is created and managed by Tapestry
www.tapestryofpeace.org
Tapestry’s Vision
Tapestry envisions a world where all life and the earth itself are free from exploitation—a vegan world where no living being suffers harm in the name of religion and where anymals and earth are treated with care, dignity, and respect.
Tapestry’s Mission
Three strands shape Tapestry’s work—scholarship, direct-action, and the arts. Tapestry is at the forefront of discovering, compiling, and sharing well-vetted information with those best-positioned to bring change—scholars, activists, and for religion topics, people of faith. Tapestry also works in the field, rescuing wildlife, working with local animal shelters, and promoting vegan options at events and eateries—always defending animals when the need arises. Finally, Tapestry both produces and encourages art as activism—art designed to help bring peace and justice to every living being and the planet.
Tapestry’s Religion Program
Bringing change among the world’s 5.8 billion diverse people of faith requires knowledge—knowledge that is not currently available. While sacred teachings overwhelmingly require compassionate action, very few people know the breadth or specifics of these important teachings, but many know the few, isolated, worn-out scriptures commonly used to defend the status quo. Highlighting this deficiency, some well-established organizations have added bits of information about religious ethics and animals across a sampling of religious traditions, but this scattered approach only highlights the need for a website that provides comprehensive, systematic coverage on the topic of animals and religions—a website developed and vetted by scholars inside each religious tradition that will answer to the religious needs of people of faith. Tapestry’s Animals & Religion website will provide comprehensive, systematic, thoroughly researched coverage of animals and ethics in each of the world’s largest and most influential religions: Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism, Daoism, Hinduism, Native Religions, Islam, Jainism, and Judaism.
Tapestry’s Director
Internationally known for an intersectional approach to ethics, professor emeritus Dr. Lisa Kemmerer has been an activist for four decades. Kemmerer founded and directs the educational, information-sharing non-profit, Tapestry (tapestryofpeace.org), has written more than 100 articles (most of which are available on her website or at ResearchGate), and dozens of books, including Vegan Ethics: AMORE—5 Reasons to Choose Vegan; Eating Earth: Environmental Ethics and Dietary Choice; Animals and Christianity; Sister Species: Women, Animals, and Social Justice; and three poetry chapbooks. For more information, please visit lisakemmerer.com and tapestryofpeace.org.
Founder & Director
Lisa Kemmerer
Internationally known for an intersectional approach to ethics, professor emeritus Dr. Lisa Kemmerer has been a passionate activist for four decades. While most often working independently, Kemmerer founded her first animal activist organization in the eighties. She chose to become a teacher in the hope of bringing positive change. In the early nineties, well ahead of the curve, she began to work across causes as a graduate student, exploring animal ethics through the lens of both religion and environment.
As a professor, Kemmerer focused on kindness and a pro-active approach to social justice, encouraging and sponsoring feminist, LGBT+, environmental, and animal activist student initiatives. She became an award-winning author with her first book and has since written more than 100 articles (many available at lisakemmerer.com or at ResearchGate) and thirteen more books, including Vegan Ethics: AMORE; Eating Earth: Environmental Ethics and Dietary Choice; Sister Species: Women, Animals, and Social Justice; Animals and Christianity; and Animals and Judaism—as well as three poetry collections.
Dr. Kemmerer’s work brought invitations to speak not only across North America, but in South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia, where she mixed speaking engagements with direct action, working with local activists in India to ban water buffalo races and in Kenya to disarm and remove illegal animal traps. She won half a dozen awards as a professor before retiring to become a full-time activist. As founder and director of Tapestry, Dr. Kemmerer seeks justice, compassion, and caretaking for animals, people, and the planet. (see lisakemmerer.com and tapestryofpeace.org).