Religious Studies News

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.

Resources

Bauman, 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.

Syllabus - Environmental Ethics - Jenkins

Syllabus - Environmental Theologies - Jenkins