| Divinity and Forestry: Graduate Religious Education for Environmental Problems |
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Willis Jenkins, Yale University
Reading Theologies as Reform StrategiesI teach in a divinity school that offers a joint degree with a school of forestry and environmental studies. A collaboration that might have seemed awkward or curious in a previous era seems fitting in ours, appropriate to our most difficult cultural challenges. Professional competency for the graduates of both schools increasingly requires aptitudes for engaging complex ecological problems that exceed normal disciplinary competencies and outstrip received moral inheritances. The syllabus for my “Environmental Theologies” course (cross-listed in both schools) helps students interpret what happens in the gap between inherited traditions and the challenges of unprecedented problems. I set a pluralist course of readings covering several distinct strategies of response emerging from Christian traditions, and then rely on a religiously and professionally diverse classroom in which some students will question whether those strategies are faithful developments of those traditions and others will ask whether they are adequate responses to the problems at hand. My pedagogical assumption is that the tension between received traditions and emerging problems can help shape professional aptitudes needed by students in both schools. For my theological students, I want unprecedented problems like climate change to stimulate inventive forms of participation in their traditions. Inventiveness requires an aptitude for reform that does something more than merely criticize religious inheritances for their inadequacy. Criticizing some idea of Christianity (or any other tradition) with some idea of ecology (or any other science) seems unlikely to help moral communities address specific problems. So I ask theology students to first interpret how faith communities make environmental problems significant for their way of living the faith. How, for instance, do they make toxic exposure a theological problem? How do they make toxins perilous to their account of the experience of God? Then I ask students how a community’s strategy could be critiqued and cultivated so that it generates more adequate responses to that problem, or so that it can address another kind of problem (e.g., climate change). My environmental management students face a different sort of challenge. I want them to move beyond seeing religion as a very strong kind of authority, a treasury of useful moral symbols, or the key to reaching odd political constituents. (Those are three instrumental reasons commonly given for wanting to take the course.) I want them to learn a more robust religious pragmatism by appreciating how religious communities mobilize logics of change, how they discover new capacities from their patterns of life, and how they invent new possibilities from cultural inheritances. I ask environmental students to see in the ways that religious communities confront new problems a microcosm of how cultures learn and change, and to find in that change a role for their own professional skills. Scientists can learn to present problems to various Christian communities in ways that productively disturb their central commitments, leading to more useful responses to a given problem. Working together, students interpret a dozen trajectories of responses to ecological problems from a dozen different theological traditions. With the mix of students in the class, I can rely on someone in the room being familiar with each of the various traditions and environmental problems. I organize the variety according to theological tradition because I want students to first appreciate why Christian environmental projects differ so much from one another. Anabaptist environmental theologies do different things than Catholic sacramental theologies because they work with a different background narrative of nature and grace, incarnation and agency. Different environmental reform projects also work with varying senses of what it means to belong to a tradition. Eastern Orthodox theologies and North American creation spiritualities both revisit the doctrine of Sophia, but do so differently in part because they have divergent sensibilities about how tradition works. The interpretive task of reading across a range of theologies that do different things with similar beliefs and symbols can be frustrating for students who want to work out one normative relation of “Christianity and ecology.” By the latter third of the semester, however, students begin to recognize a meaningful pluralism, seeing how communities shape distinctive patterns of response according to distinctive theological commitments. Students begin to sense how ministerial and ecological professionals might interact with communities according to their still-developing reform strategies. The semester culminates with students presenting work that focuses on a particular theological community addressing a particular environmental problem. You might expect the theological and reform-oriented approach I have described from an ethicist, but it is certainly not the only way to study environment and religion. The pedagogy of my “Environmental Theologies” syllabus is more theological and more pragmatic than other good ways to teach the intersection of religious and environmental studies. Because Yale University hosts the Forum on Religion and Ecology, codirected by Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim, students also have the opportunity to take environmental courses that focus on Asian and indigenous traditions from teachers with a facility for interpreting how religions should transition toward an ecological cosmology. Together we can offer a range of courses that present students with several perspectives on how to think with religious and ecological ideas. In order to help students reflect together amidst our diverse perspectives, we host a periodic colloquium required of joint degree students and open to all students interested in the area of religion and ecology. I myself teach religious ideas differently in other divinity/forestry cross-listed courses. I teach an “Environmental Ethics” course, for example, in which religious approaches appear as one option among many normative frameworks for addressing environmental problems. There I use religious ideas to introduce a common, practical dilemma keenly felt by a rising generation of environmental professionals: should we work on problems within the modest possibilities offered by prevailing frameworks of civil debate, or should we work for the deep cultural changes offered in some cosmological alternatives or religious countervisions? Other approaches to the intersection of religion and nature focus the methods of religious studies on a more descriptive approach to the earth-related religiosity that appears in popular culture and emergent spiritualities. Those approaches are especially helpful for renegotiating received categories of “religion” and “nature.” I once taught an undergraduate course at the University of Virginia by reading classics of nature writing alongside classic texts of religious studies (e.g., Henry David Thoreau with Mircea Eliade) and I think it opened young minds both to the religious dimensions of environmental sentiment and — more importantly — to the depth of human self-understanding involved in ways of relating to the more-than-human world. For my graduate students, however, I am focused on cultivating aptitudes of participation in cultural reform. My pedagogical assumption is explicitly normative in that I assume that the leaders we are training must face complex environmental problems and that they need better ethical resources for doing so. I think these leaders and their communities can meet new problems pragmatically by developing new resources and inventing new capacities from their cultural inheritances. “Environmental Theologies” exemplifies the particularity and pluralism those pedagogical assumptions require. It supposes that Christian communities invent new moral capacities through distinctive theological arguments. Constructive interaction with those communities, therefore, requires understanding their patterns of argument and the projects of reform they support. By pressing students to interpret the variety emerging just from Christian communities, I invite them into an ethical task shared across traditions. If societies are to take responsibility for their interaction with ecological systems, they must find ways to inscribe the significance of environmental problems into ways of making sense of human experience. The particularism and pluralism of the course are signs of a reformist sensibility aimed at the heart of religious experience. By the time we come to the end of the semester’s exercise in reading, the practical question is no longer “How would one apply Christian theology to climate change?” It is rather “How could this strategy use the challenge of climate change to make its theological tradition more capable of generating meaningful responses to the problem?” It seems facile to say that our professionals must be interdisciplinary and that religionists and scientists must learn to get along. For our professionals must be able to do more than learn from other fields — they must learn how to use multiple knowledges to transform cultures so that they become competent to face new problems. Our religious and environmental professionals must be inventive, helping communities create new competencies to face new problems. Reading a good syllabus can help students learn to look for reform processes, but in terms of shaping professional aptitudes nothing is better than actually participating in the work of communities attempting to face a novel, complex problem. This year I invited students to participate with me in an Anglican North/South dialogue on climate justice, cohosted by the Episcopal bishops of California and Curitiba (Brazil). Students listened to the dialogue, attentive to how participants were drawing on their tradition’s resources. They invited other participants to deepen their strategies in ways that seemed likely to help this Anglican community become more concretely responsible — precisely by finding ways to become more faithful. That is one instance of the many little works of cultural change that a pluralist world needs in order to face problems like climate change. Perhaps the most important thing that teachers of environmental ethics can do is prepare students to work within the gap between the capacities of received traditions and the challenge of unprecedented problems. ResourcesBauman, Whitney, Richard Bohannon, and Kevin O'Brien, eds. Grounding Religion: A Field Guide to the Study of Religion and Ecology. New York: Routledge, 2010. Jenkins, Willis. Ecologies of Grace: Environmental Ethics and Christian Theology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Schaefer, Jame. Theological Foundations for Environmental Ethics: Reconstructing Patristic and Medieval Concepts. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2009. Theokritoff, Elizabeth. Living in God’s Creation: Orthodox Perspectives on Ecology. Yonkers, NY: Saint Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2009. Tucker, Mary Evelyn, and John Grim, series eds. Religions of the World and Ecology, 10 vols. Boston: Harvard University Press, 1998–2003. |
Willis Jenkins is the Margaret Farley Assistant Professor of Social Ethics at Yale Divinity School and holds a secondary appointment to the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. He teaches courses on environmental ethics, ecotheologies, global ethics, and Christian social thought. He is the author of Ecologies of Grace: Environmental Ethics and Christian Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).