IRCPL’s Religion and Climate series is animated by calls to reimagine human relationships with and responsibilities to the environment in an age of planetary crisis. As the impact of climate change is increasingly but unevenly felt, religion is emerging as a site of epistemological doubt, struggle, and possibility. This series will explore the cosmological underpinnings that shape diverse understandings of the environment and examine how religious subjects react to and act upon the ecological upheavals they face, challenging exclusively technocratic or secular responses to the climate crisis.
upcoming Events
Apr 25, 2024
12:10 PM – 1:50 PM
IRCPL’s Religion and Climate series is animated by calls to reimagine human relationships with and responsibilities to the environment in an age of planetary crisis. As the impact of climate change is increasingly but unevenly felt, religion is emerging as a site of epistemological doubt, struggle, and possibility. This series will explore the cosmological underpinnings that shape diverse understandings of the environment and examine how religious subjects react to and act upon the ecological upheavals they face, challenging exclusively technocratic or secular responses to the climate crisis.
The series will begin with four events structured around the elements—Earth, Fire, Water, and Air—each of which will take one element as a lens for engaging with specific climate struggles and the religious debates they ignite. In the second event, an online program on the theme of “Fire,” Adriana Petryna (University of Pennsylvania) and Mareike Winchell (London School of Economics) will discuss their work on wildfires in the United States and Bolivia, exploring both the political-theological dimensions of fire and complexities of taking action to prevent environmental disasters.
PAST EVENTS ON CLIMATE (Events Archive)
Mar 4, 2024
12:10 PM – 1:50 PM
IRCPL’s Religion and Climate series is animated by calls to reimagine human relationships with and responsibilities to the environment in an age of planetary crisis. As the impact of climate change is increasingly but unevenly felt, religion is emerging as a site of epistemological doubt, struggle, and possibility. This series will explore the cosmological underpinnings that shape diverse understandings of the environment and examine how religious subjects react to and act upon the ecological upheavals they face, challenging exclusively technocratic or secular responses to the climate crisis.
The series will begin with four events structured around the elements—Earth, Fire, Water, and Air—each of which will take one element as a lens for engaging with specific climate struggles and the religious debates they ignite. In the first talk, Eleanor Johnson will engage with the ever-shifting concept of “waste” from Genesis to the late Middle Ages, showing how land matters to premodern ecosystemic thought in England.
Nov 1, 2022 5:30 PM – 7:00 PM
ANOINTED WITH OIL: HOW CHRISTIANITY AND CRUDE MADE MODERN AMERICA
Few would question petroleum’s historical importance to our nation, or the critical role that Christianity has played in shaping its contours. Yet what happens if we link both entities together and place them at the center of modern American history? In this talk Darren Dochuk will explore how, from its earliest discovery during the Civil War to the present, this liquid resource assumed sacred form as the nation's special blessing and its peculiar burden, the source of its prophetic mission in the world. In the boardrooms, drill sites, pulpits, and pews of this country’s oil patches, meanwhile, petroleum executives, wildcat producers, and rank-and-file workers who mutually embraced oil as God’s gift fundamentally transformed US religion and politics—boosting America's ascent as the preeminent global power, fueling the rise of the evangelical Republican Right, and setting the terms for today's debates over energy and environment. With an eye to current trends, and America’s moment of crisis, in this talk Dochuk will measure the legacies of religion and oil’s distinctive bond.
Nov 22, 2022 5:30 PM – 7:00 PM
In the past decade, artists, curators, and art historians have been increasingly exploring performative and installation work tied to spiritual manifestations. The retrieval of Indigenous and Afro-Diasporic belief systems and cosmogonies has been at the heart of this discussion as the art world becomes more decolonized, decentered, and polyphonic. This revamped spiritual turn in the arts signals an interest in building new, interconnected epistemologies with healing practices as a central source of concern. This conversation, with two leading figures in the Caribbean art world, will highlight how ritualistic and collective acts can provide us with tools to build more sustainable relationships with nature and with each other.
The Non-Religious Origins of Religious Climate Opposition? Climate Communication on The Glenn Beck Program, 2009 to 2011
Researchers who are interested in understanding how religion affects Americans’ attitudes toward climate change have typically conceptualized religious influence as emerging from within organized religious traditions. On this view, if religion affects Catholics’ climate attitudes at all, it will be through a specifically Catholic source such as Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si’ or though the influence of other Catholic parishioners. I suggest that this view may be missing a significant vector for religious influence on attitudes toward climate change: conservative media. Examining the transcripts of the top-rated Fox News program The Glenn Beck Program from 2009 to 2011, I explore how the eponymous host framed climate change in Christian nationalist terms as a threat to the Founding Father’s vision for America. I suggest that ostensibly secular media sources may be an under-researched mechanism by which religion is shaping climate attitudes, one that is worth exploring because of this religiosity’s ability to provide a sense of firm foundations in uncertain times.
In Deep: Water, Covid, Climate Change - A conversation with Elizabeth Kolbert
Elizabeth Kolbert’s Pulitzer Prize for The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History established her reputation as today’s most important and influential science writer for the general public. Exploring caves, underwater worlds, tropical rain forests, frozen Antarctica, and the heavens above, she brings back dire warnings about impending catastrophes and the urgent need to respond before it is too late.
In this event, Mark C. Taylor, who teaches the philosophy of religion at Columbia, will be in discussion with Kolbert about her personal background and long experience as a science writer. What are the most critical threats to human life as well as the survival of countless other species? How is the war on science to be understood? Can attitudes and policies change fast enough to respond effectively? And are there any technological solutions to this unprecedented existential threat?
Making Land Work For Good
Today, technology and science allow us to measure and track the state of our environment. We now understand the extent of damage caused by human activity and the critical situation in which we find ourselves. Civilization's continuation will be enabled not by our collective regression but by using our best technology, most advanced science, novel collaborations, and creativity to reframe our relationship with nature.
We have everything we need. We just need to be more aware of what we have, be aware of its current impact, and understand its problems and possibilities. Once we understand that, we can fully realize our property's powerful potential to shape the landscapes of our future—and our power to choose whether we will use it to create the just, flourishing future all humanity deserves. We have a choice. Choose to #MakeLandWorkForGood.
The Devouring of the World and the Climate Crisis
In this talk, the indigenous thinker and philosopher Ailton Krenak urges us to take seriously the value of the indigenous philosophies of the Americas when it comes to confronting the climate change crisis. The author of Ideas to Postpone the End of the World and A Vida Não Útil (Life is Not Useful), here Krenak offers a trenchant critique of the extent to which an understanding of the earth as a resource to be exploited has taken hold in the wake of globalization, as well as how the logic of consumption is enabled by the “cognitive abyss”—our inability to listen and to see what is happening to the world.
This event was in Portuguese with interpretation provided.