Podcast: Religion and Climate Change

Dr Marlene Schäfers & Dr Iona Hine co-host our third mini-series, exploring how religious communities are responding to climate change. The founder of this podcast, Dr Schäfers is a social anthropologist and held a Newton International Fellowship awarded by the British Academy. Dr Hine is CIP’s Programme Manager.

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Episode 9: Ethics for the Coming Storm: a podcast with Professor Laurie Zoloth

This third instalment on religion and climate change was recorded as a standalone conversation and is now incorporated into the ongoing miniseries. Professor Laurie Zoloth (University of Chicago) discusses why religion is vital as we seek a sufficient response to the challenges of climate change. An ethicist and scholar of religion, Laurie shares her own experience recognising and responding to the crisis and her mandate for other scholars of religion: Interrupt! 

 

About Laurie Zoloth

At the time of recording Laurie Zoloth was Margaret E Burton Professor of Ethics at the University of Chicago and former Dean of Chicago’s Divinity School. She has served as President of the American Academy of Religion, President of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities, and Vice President of the Society for Jewish Ethics. Professor Zoloth was also a founding board member for the International Society for Stem Cell Research, the Society for Neuroethics, and the Society for Scriptural Reasoning. She holds a Life Fellowship at Clare Hall, Cambridge.

Episode 9: references

  • Laurie Zoloth (2023) Ethics for the Coming Storm: Climate Change and Jewish Thought
  • Dale Jamieson (2014) Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed -- and What It Means for Our Future Get access Arrow
  • Mark Lynas (2008) Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet
  • Natan Levy, H. Haleem & D. Shreeve (2013) Sharing Eden: Green Teachings from Jews, Christians and Muslims
  • Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013) Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
  • Sarah E. Fredericks (2021) Environmental Guilt and Shame: Signals of Individual and Collective Responsibility and the Need for Ritual Responses
  • Yale Forum on Religion & Ecology—hosted at fore.yale.edu

The following persons also feature in the discussion: Bill McKibben, Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt, Immanuel Kant, Jimmy Carter, Magarete Susman, Naomi Oreskes, Reinhold Niebuhr.

Episode 9: Music

Calm background for video by Ivymusic.

Episode 8: Theology in the Anthropocene: a podcast with Dr Hjördis Becker-Linderthal and Dr Simone Kotva

In this second instalment on religion and climate change, we host Dr Hjördis Becker-Lindenthal (University of Cambridge) and Dr Simone Kotva (University of Oslo) to talk about the reverberations of Christian theology within environmental movements. Together we discuss how to face the end of the world as we know it, how to tackle climate despair, and what it might mean to cultivate a spiritual attitude toward nature.

 

About Hjördis Becker-Linderthal

At the time of recording, Hjördis Becker-Linderthal was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow and affiliated lecturer at the Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge. She works on the intersection of philosophy, theology, intellectual history and literature. Hjördis published a study on The Repetition of Philosophy: Kierkegaard’s Cultural Critique and its Consequences (Die Wiederholung der Philosophie. Kierkegaards Kulturkritik und ihre Folgen (De Gruyter)) and she is currently writing a monograph on Kierkegaard’s reception of the medieval mystic Johannes Tauler. Together with Dr Simone Kotva, Hjördis teaches the MPhil course Envisioning the Environmental Future: Theology in the Anthropocene at the Faculty of Divinity in Cambridge.

About Simone Kotva

At the time of recording Simone Kotva was a Research Fellow at the Faculty of Theology, University of Oslo, and affiliated lecturer at the Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge. Simone's work is situated at the intersection of theology, critical theory and earth ethics. With Hjördis Becker-Lindenthal she teaches the MPhil module, Theology in the Anthropocene, and has published widely on religion and ecology.

Episode 8: references

  • Becker-Lindenthal, Hjördis (forthcoming), “Climate Despair from a Kierkegaardian Perspective: Asceticism, Possibility and Eschatological Hope”. In Living in Uncertainty. Kierkegaard and Possibility, ed. by Erin Plunkett, London: Bloomsbury.
  • Becker-Lindenthal, Hjördis and Simone Kotva (forthcoming), “Practicing for Death in the Anthropocene: Reading Christian Asceticism After the End of the Human.”
  • Bruckner, Pascal (2013), The Fanaticism of the Apocalypse: Save the Earth, Punish Human Beings, translated by Stephen Rendall, Cambridge: Polity.
  • Garrard, Greg (2013), “Environmentalism and the Apocalypse Tradition,” Green Letters 3: 27–68.
  • Keller, Catherine (2018), Political Theology of the Earth: Our Planetary Emergency and the Struggle for a New Public, New York: Columbia University Press.
  • Keller, Catherine (2021), Facing Apocalypse: Climate, Democracy, and Other Last Chances, Marknoll: Orbis Books.
  • Kierkegaard, Søren (1980 [1849]), The Sickness Unto Death. A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening, ed. and trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Kierkegaard’ Writings, XIX), Princeton: Princeton University Press.
  • Kotva, Simone and Eva-Charlotta Mebius (2021), “Rethinking Environmentalism and Apocalypse: Anamorphosis in The Book of Enoch and Climate Fiction,” Religions 12(8):620. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12080620
  • Lear, Jonathan (2006), Radical Hope. Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
  • Moltmann, Jürgen (1979), The Future of Creation, trans. Margaret Kohl, London: S.C.M. Press.
  • Stengers, Isabelle (2015), In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism, trans. Andrew Goffey, Lüneburg: Open Humanities Press.
  • Walsh, Sylvia (2009), Kierkegaard: Thinking Christianly in an Existential Mode, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Episode 8: Music

Pacing by Chad Crouch.

Episode 7: Spirituality, religious communities and climate change activism: a podcast with Dr Tobias Müller

In this first episode of our mini-series on religion and climate change, we host Dr Tobias Müller (University of Cambridge) to talk about the role religious communities play in climate change activism. Reporting from his research with Extinction Rebellion (XR) and at COP26, Tobias talks about the many points of convergence between spirituality and climate activism and highlights how religious communities and their heritage can become crucial resources in the fight for a just, carbon-neutral future.

 

About Tobias Müller

At the time of recording, Tobias Müller was Affiliated Lecturer at the Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS), College Research Associate at King’s College, University of Cambridge, and Research Fellow at The New Institute, Hamburg. Previously, he was postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs (ISGA) at Leiden University and Junior Research Fellow at the Woolf Institute, Cambridge.

His main research interests include political and social theory, decolonial and feminist theory, secularism and religion, masculinities and extremism, and the politics of climate change. His recent work was published in Political Theory, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Social Compass, Religion, State and Society, Review of Faith & International Affairs, Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Politikwissenschaft / Comparative Politics and Governance and Nature.

Episode 7: references

  • De la Cadena, Marisol (2015) Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice Across Andean Worlds. Durham: Duke University Press.
  • Ellingson, Stephen (2016) To Care for Creation: The Emergence of the Religious Environmental Movement. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  • Escobar, Arturo (2016) “Thinking-feeling with the Earth: Territorial struggles and the ontological dimension of the epistemologies of the south.” Revista de Antropología Iberoamericana 11: 11–32.
  • Federici, Silvia (2018) Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons. Oakland: PM Press.
  • Ghosh, Amitav (2016). The Great Derangement. Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Chapter three.
  • Latour, Bruno (2017). Facing Gaia. Eight Lectures on the New Climactic Regime. Cambridge: Polity. Particularly lectures three, five, six.
  • Müller, Tobias (2020) “People of Faith are Allies to stall Climate Change.” Nature, 592, 9.
  • Tsing, Anna (2005). Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Episode 7: Music

Plaster Combo by Blue Dot Sessions; Alustrat by Blue Dot Sessions.