# Video: Religious Literacy and Climate Justice May 11, 2023 ![RPL Government Fellow Rev. Naomi Washington-Leapheart speaks at the Religious Literacy and Climate Justice panel for Climate Justice Week. She sits next to RPL Native and Indigenous Rights Fellow Cynthia Wilson.](/sites/g/files/omnuum8216/files/styles/hwp_16_9__480x270/public/rpl/files/041423-climatejusticeweek-rlpipanel-43-crop.jpg?h=8241e8ce&itok=_WQ20Cd3) On April 14, 2023, Religion and Public Life Fellows with expertise in policy, environmental science, Native and Indigenous rights, and education discussed the ways religious and spiritual literacy can enhance policy and scientific efforts to understand the drivers of climate collapse and advance climate justice. The panel featured Cythia Wilson, RPL Native and Indigenous Rights Fellow; Teresa Cavazos Cohn, RPL Climate Justice Fellow; and Rev. Naomi Washington-Leapheart, RPL Government Fellow. Sarabinh Levy-Brightman, RPL Education Fellow, acted as moderator. FULL TRANSCRIPT SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School. SPEAKER 2: Religious Literacy and Climate Justice, April 14, 2023. SUSAN O. HAYWARD: It's great to start off the morning with all of you. I'm Susie Hayward. I'm the associate director for Religious Literacy and the Professions in the Religion and Public Life Office, and we have been one of the many offices at HDS that has been supporting this student-led Climate Justice Week events in conversation. We were very pleased to do so and very thankful to the students led by Anna Del Castillo, but with Ameerah, Maya, and John, who are here in spirit right now, but I think still running from class to be able to support these incredible events and conversations that have been happening. So this morning's panel is going to focus on a particular question. What does the critical study of religion have to offer in thinking about developing scientific and policy responses to climate that are just and holistic and inclusive? We have four wonderful people, four of my favorite people who are here to break open that question for us. Each of these folks is one of our Fellows in Religion and Public Life, and they work with students in our certificate in Religion and Public Life Program, helping them think through what religious literacy means for work across different professional fields and addressing particular justice issues. So I'm going to take a moment to introduce all of them before I hand it over to Sarabinh to lead us forward. First, in the middle here, is Cynthia Wilson, who is our Religion and Public Life Program Fellow on Indigenous and Native Rights. Cyn is a tribal member of the Navajo Nation, who's pursuing her PhD at UC Berkeley, studying Native Food Sovereignty. And she was a critical organizer in the efforts to protect and establish Bears Ears National Monuments. Next, on the far end, is the Rev. Naomi Washington-Leapheart, a UCC pastor, who currently serves as director for Faith-Based and Interfaith Affairs for the city of Philadelphia and serves on the Interfaith Advisory Team to the Department of Homeland Security. And then here we have Teresa Cavazos Cohn, who is associate professor of Natural Resources and the Environment at UNH Durham and is co-founder of the Confluence Lab, which brings together scholars in science, arts, and the humanities to address environmental issues in an interdisciplinary approach, especially as they impact rural communities. And then, finally, our moderator for today is Sarabinh Levy-Brightman, who's a former high school humanities teacher, including just down the road at the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, with a particular interest in critical and creative pedagogy and, more recently, questions of time, which she is going to bring to her role as moderator today. So Sarabinh, I'll hand it over to you. Take it away. \[APPLAUSE\] SARABINH LEVY-BRIGHTMAN: Well, that was timely because I didn't know that's what I was doing. \[LAUGHTER\] No. First of all, thank you for being here today. And I want to extend a real thanks to the students at HDS. This is an event that was conceived of by them and, in this week, created, conceived of, and driven by them. So it's really an honor for all of us to be up here today to think together and to think with you all a little bit. And I think that when students gather to create in this community, really wonderful things happen. And it is a gift to be part of that in this week. Today, we're going to move very simply down the line. Teresa's going to open up by talking about some of the science and some of what she's thinking about with respect to the science, given her experience working in interdisciplinary ways, and particularly over the past two years, increasingly thinking about the place of religion. Teresa is a scientist. Each of these people here, as is probably quite evident, are not religious scholars—although, Naomi comes closest—but really are living now at the intersection of their work out in the world and then questions that they are tangling with as they're working at HDS and working with students at HDS. So Teresa is going to begin, and then Cyn will speak and then Naomi. I may jump in after each of them with a question or two if the spirit so moves. And then, afterwards, we will open up for conversation among the three of them, given what they are speaking about to you and to each other. And following that, we'll open up for questions and conversation with the whole room. So Teresa. TERESA CAVAZOS COHN: Thank you. Is this on? You can hear me OK? Good. I just wanted to start with my own thanks to the students this week and for this abundance of conversation with the fellows and with presentations this week. I'm feeling full and humbled and grateful to all of the work that everyone's put in for this. And I'm also thinking a lot about story, which I think is a theme among the fellows, and also among people who've talked over the past few days and I know is of interest in this space. And so I want to speak really personally here about story and where I've been over the last two years as a fellow in this program. So as fellows may remember, a year ago, I was really deep in fire, working with fire in the American West. And I was going through a series of interviews that we'd done with my research team, with people who had experienced firsthand wildfire. So we were hearing a lot of stories about fire tearing through communities and sparing things like plastic toys and burning others, and I remember a community that had two churches that had been competing, coming together right around flame and fire. And we were listening carefully to these stories, and the purpose of it was to really examine these stories and what was coming out of them, to think about what the stories were saying, how to merge this with what was coming out of wildland fire science to see if—are there better ways that we can manage fire in this space? Are there better ways that we can live with increasing fire and, more generally, with increasing disturbance? So those were our questions. On a more personal note, I—this is my own personal experiment—wanted to think about fire for myself. You hear about all these stories, and you realize, oh, wait, do I know how I feel about fire? What's my fire story? And so I started knowing, from fire scientists in the places that I was living, our return intervals for large-scale fires was beyond my lifetime. And thinking about climate change and climate change disturbance, this is often the case. We have to think beyond ourselves and through the Pleistocene, before the Pleistocene. What are our tools to be able to do that? And so I wanted to look into my family story, my mom's story, my grandparents' stories, and so on, both sides of my families. I tracked these stories by fire. And when Rebecca Solnit spoke the other night and talked about this great metaphor, about just following this—all have to do is follow the headlights, as far as you can see by the headlights. And you'll find your way home when you're steering in the dark. And it felt so familiar to me that I just leaped story by story through my family, starting with a story I'd heard from my aunt about my grandfather pulling a man out of burning flames in the \[NON-ENGLISH\], these little houses where they were living behind their house about six miles north of the Rio Grande River in McAllen, Texas, and then back to my grandfather and his stories about the Mexican Revolution. And so a lot of these stories I didn't know because I didn't to ask. These aren't the familiar family stories, because they aren't—fire gives you the questions to ask in a way that I didn't have the language for. And so last—oh, probably July, I was feeling very good about this. And I'd wrapped up this chapter in a tight little bow. But as stories that aren't finished due, I was agitated. It wasn't done. It wasn't done. And there was a loose end, and I remembered the story myself. I'm the kitchen. I'm in high school. I'm in the kitchen. Mom slams the receiver down on the phone when phones were still on walls and says, the lawyers made out like bandits. Nobody else got anything. And I knew it was about a leak, a spill under—from a leaky underground storage tank in the gas station down the road from my grandma's house. And so last summer, I was in my office. And I started looking into this, and it was not just a leaky underground storage tank. It was much more colossal. So 4 feet of free-phase hydrocarbons floating on 30 acres of ground water 30 feet underground is what I found. So if the plume were above ground, it would have been a lake flooding 180 homes, an elementary school, a whole community. And I found that they're still cleaning this up now, so this is in the '90s that this originally had happened. And so this was ongoing. And I found a news clip, dug it up on the internet, in which one of the neighbors, Gracie Ozuna, who apparently was the first to believe that the \[NON-ENGLISH\], the chemicals under the ground caused her daughter's death of leukemia and then that there was another childhood leukemia death and someone else who died of cancer in that same neighborhood. And they're on 24th Street. This was on 21st and 22nd Street. So I wrote some thoughts down and just thinking about, maybe it sounds easier finding the headlights. It sounds easier than it is steering the headlights home, and I'm thinking about what Terry often tells her students about writing to what threatens to kill you. In my family, right before COVID, my aunt had died of leukemia. And two years before that, I had an uncle who died of a different kind of leukemia. So suddenly, in my office last July, I was reconfiguring this whole story in my mind. What are the links? How do we find these links? And again, I don't think I was yet home. In a way, I think I've been pausing. And I'm back now in this moment reconsidering, what does this mean? And in story, how do you know when you're home? So if I'm thinking now, and as I was thinking last night, that home was maybe not just my aunt's blood or my uncle's bone and the way that I rethought those. Home was when the port into my Aunt Mary's arm became the groundwater well that was also measuring the Earth, probing and measuring. And home was when I realized I was fundamentally wrong in the questions that I'd been asking about climate change and about fire. I thought that understanding our own stories would help us do what stories do best, allow us to connect to the emotion that encourages us to change. But now I realize that fire is the one that's telling the story to us, through us, and so is the water and air. And these systems are Earth systems, the hydrosphere, the geosphere, and their processes and functions. Our stories don't just tell them. They tell us. So I want to take a leap here and say, in my other life in New Hampshire, I'm teaching a first-level introductory course called Environmental Awareness and Modern Conservation Issues. And this is a title for a course that maybe you can tell is about 20, 25 years old, I think. And we are not in that place anymore. We're not talking about wolves, and we're not talking about just sea otters. We're talking about entire Earth systems in flux. That's what I think environmental awareness means. And I think it's critical that my students and we are aware of these Earth systems, the hydrosphere, the geosphere, atmosphere, cryosphere—personal favorite. And like in any good relationships, that we invest in really understanding how these systems work for our sake and for ours. For example, I think it's really important that we understand the difference between stratospheric ozone, which will save us, and tropospheric ozone, that is killing us actively right now. And I think it's important to tend to these spaces and scientific spaces with all of their problems and all of the—which I'm well aware, the equity issues in science, the racism issues in science. And this isn't just for rational, logical reasons so we can save our planet and save ourselves. My own take on these systems is how—when I stay up at night, 1:30, 2:00 in the morning, I think they're beautiful. They're beautiful systems. I could weep thinking about thermohaline currents, how Arctic sea ice and the salt differentials are powering our whole oceanic conveyor belt. They're impacting the weather outside right now. I think this is beautiful, and I think understanding it is—I don't want to use the word "investment"—is worth the relationship. It's worth the engagement because it helps us know who we are and where we are. And so I want to sum up and say, perhaps what I've realized most this year at RPL is that this may be religious. I never thought of this before. \[LAUGHTER\] That this deep love for how—my deep love for how the world works, Earth, fire, water, snow, that may be religious. And also, this realization for me that one of the great reciprocities between Earth and humanity is story, the stories we tell about the Earth and the story it tells us back. And this last year at RPL, I think my best work over the last year in this time of climate change was tending better to my listening. And I will say that I know Cyn has a lot to say about the story. Pass on to you. \[APPLAUSE\] CYNTHIA WILSON: Yeah. Thank you, Teresa. And thank you as well to the HDS students for organizing. \[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH\] And I just mentioned my clans, my mom's clan, my dad's clan, my maternal grandfather's clan, my paternal grandfather's clan, and how that makes me a Diné woman. And through my clan, I feel like is my way of storytelling is acknowledging my ancestral roots through my identity, knowing who I am and where I come from. And basically, a lot of our teachings is from our home, which our home is a round hogan made up of Juniper wood. And it's a circular structure, and we peel off the bark off the cedar wood or the Juniper wood, and then we fill it in as insulation between the logs. And then we pack mud in a round structure, which is our home. And in the center is the fire, and the fire is our teacher and who is our teacher that reminds us of who we are. And the fire being is who we pray to. And when I say pray, in our language, prayer means \[NON-ENGLISH\],, which literally means our tongue. And \[NON-ENGLISH\] means upholding that reverence. So in translating that, it really means, the words that we speak out of our mouth is not owned by us. It's owned by our inner air people. And when we spit it out of our tongue, the mist travels a long journey so that it's heard by all, more than human beings. And that's how our voice is so powerful, and that's how we acknowledge who we are as the Diné people. And a lot of my teachings are based on me being from the Navajo Nation and me knowing my creation stories and knowing my upbringing in how prayer in our language is maintaining our relationship to the mountain people, to the water people, and the animal people, the plant people, because without them, then we don't have a home. We don't have the fire at the center. So a lot of my work was based on listening, listening to the voices of our community, our elders, our knowledge holders, and our medicine people. And by listening, we were able to create a proposal to designate Bears Ears National Monument with the build-up of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, five sovereign tribal governments who use their sovereignty status to advocate with the Department of Interior in Washington, DC. And with that, we were able to have our knowledge represented in the proclamation in addition to the scientific knowledge. But what's really missing is actually acknowledging our direct relationship to the land, and it's always a challenge dealing with the legal and policy terms. And for many generations, I realize that our voices have always been misrepresented because of the English language. Even when we talk about religion, I don't view my way of life teaching as a religion, because it's our stories that have been passed down for many—since time immemorial. Our language was not gifted to us by humans. It was gifted to us by the air people. It's something that a lot of our teaching, our songs, and our prayers are not from humans. they're from these other beings that made up who we are and how we know our responsibility as Diné people to take care of them. So these stories came from my elders by listening, and that's how we were able to have a voice within the National Monument Proclamation. But there's so much to be done because of the English language. I know the American Indian Religion Freedom Act is there. But still, when I hear my community voices, there's still a challenge in access to land. There's still a hesitancy and a scare tactic, just having to feel like we have to hide just to harvest medicine, just to harvest Juniper logs to build our homes. So there's still a lot of challenge in how I see our voices missing in those spaces. So I feel that that's important in sharing our stories in who we are and through the language and as a way to open that door for our knowledge holders to maintain those relationship to the land. And also, even "land" interpreted in Diné language is "Kéyah," which "Kéyah" means your feet and the soles under your feet and its relationship to the Earth's surface. There's that direct kinship. Kéyah means your feet, and \[NON-ENGLISH\] means under the soles of your feet in that direct relationship to the Earth's surface. So it's more descriptive. But in English, "land" is more general, and it misses the key component of that relationality as it does in our interpretation for prayer. So with that, I'll hand it over to Naomi. \[CHUCKLING\] \[APPLAUSE\] NAOMI WASHINGTON-LEAPHEART: Wow. Oh. Good morning, y'all. I want to dedeaux the expressions of gratitude that my comrades, my friends have already given. I've been sitting here thinking about the through line of genealogy as critical to our understanding of ourselves and our communities, but also our understanding of land and non-human aspects of creation. And as a person who works in government, I understand that there's a complete lack of genealogical inquiry in government spaces. I live in Philadelphia. We're electing a new mayor soon. And what will happen is that new mayor will be inaugurated in January, and we will pretend like the clock starts over with this new mayor. We won't connect those present realities to their ancestry. We won't think about how, 20 years ago, begat today. And I think this refusal to do this kind of ancestral work at the level of institution, at the level of government is a critical reason why we can't have sophisticated and, I just think, beautifully complicated conversations as modeled by my friends about planet, about climate change. So I'm just thinking about how to—what dos genealogical work look like for governments? What does it mean to, before we say anything, call the role of the ancestors that produced us, that produced this policy that's on the table? I don't know. I'm struck by that as critical work, that also, I think, can be accessed through a kind of religious literacy. Here's what I mean. If governments understood the extent to which religious communities are invested in this notion of storytelling, of origin stories, of revisiting the same stories liturgical year after liturgical year after liturgical year that puts religious communities in a certain kind of disposition, of always remembering, always remembering, always remembering, I just wonder, what kind of government could we be if we weren't afraid of memory? I'm thinking about one of my favorite poets. Is this National Poetry month? Is that a thing? Lucille Clifton is one of my favorite poets. And she wrote a poem called, "why people be mad at me sometimes." That's the name of the poem. And the poem says, "people keep asking me to remember their memories, but I keep on remembering mine. Why people be mad at me sometimes?" And so I think that, what if the disconnects that are present between government institutions and communities that are in relationship with each other and to the creation—what if the disconnect is really about our lack of respect for memory for ancestry, for genealogical work? So that's just one thought that's on my mind as a result of what my colleagues said. I also think that what religious literacy, a rigor around religious literacy, brings to government is access to the language of mystery, the language of transcendence. I mean, Teresa, you started us off with—I was floating with you. I was there. This appeal to transcendence to something bigger than that humbles us, the ineffable. But so much of government is about precision of language and reducing it to the granular, and not just sitting with the mystery, sitting with the ambiguity, sitting with the transcendence, sitting with what we can only imagine. I was saying to somebody yesterday in the fellows meeting that I feel like a unicorn working in government because I'm always appealing to the transcendent, the imaginary, the mystery of the mysterious. And what if government saw its task as becoming more familiar with the transcendent and the imaginary? And the last thing I'll say is this has me thinking about—we've been talking about language and the fluencies that government does not have as it pertains to working in communities, with communities, particularly around climate justice. And so I wonder if what religious literacy does, the principles of religious literacy, demand that government cultivate more fluencies, fluency in integration and not disintegration. Government is nothing if not completely disintegrated, siloed, compartmentalized. This agency doesn't talk to that agency. This person doesn't talk to the person on the other side of the cubicle wall. But what we're describing here, following the lead of our Indigenous siblings, is the need to become fluent in integration fluent in knowledges that are fully embodied, unapologetic about their embodiment, that the body is not a barrier to good governance. But the body is critical to good governance. And I think what we have instead, at least in Philly—I don't know how it is in your neck of the woods—is a government that is hostile to bodies, hostile to, I think, interiority in a way that makes it impossible for us to have a climate justice conversation that takes seriously these ways of being and doing in the world. So those are just some things that are on my mind as I think about the need for religious literacy frameworks and competencies in government spaces. \[APPLAUSE\] SARABINH LEVY-BRIGHTMAN: Thank you, all three of you. Each of you spoke with such thoughtfulness and such beauty and such eloquence. It's really been interesting to listen to the three of you speak right now. And at the beginning, Susie mentioned time, which feels very appropriate because I haven't been in many of the sessions this week, in part because my time has been stretched in other directions, including having all our fellows here. So I do not speak, as I wish I could, from the experience of having accompanied you all in what has been taking place over the course of the week. But I am struck by a dissonance or a difference between the tenor and the content of what I have heard just now and so much of the ways in which I hear climate crisis spoken about out in the world and in the media and in the press. And I say this as an observation more than anything else, first of all, which is that, when I hear the word "climate crisis," it's followed by, how do we solve it? It's followed by, how do we guarantee continual perdurance or endurance. It's followed by, there's a problem that we need to fix. It's followed by, there are these giant systems in the world that we have created that need to be changed. I just want to note that what I've just heard here is so very different. What I've heard here is that this crisis—we need to think about this crisis as a crisis in either how we are living now or a crisis because it's making impossible how some people are living to be able to live in that way. It's a crisis of a recognition that we are in a moment in which many, many people are finding that the ways in which we are living are not meaningful as they should be, that we are deracinated. We are uprooted. We are not in relation. We're not telling the right stories. We're not entering into the right relationships. And I'm struck listening to Teresa by how much of our language, how much of the metaphors that govern our lives do come from science, that if we think about the language we use to understand ourselves, we're often using language from contemporary or just slightly dated science. So now we talk about thinking the way we've learned to talk about computers and feeling. How are you processing that? Do you have all the information you need? And I think about the way in which Teresa was talking about these layers of the atmosphere and talking about and has spoken before to me about layers of the Earth under our feet and thinks about the nature of ice and water and that, the scientific world opens up the possibility of incredibly rich metaphor. We see this with thinkers like the physicist Carlo Rovelli or if you listen to Neil deGrasse Tyson speak, that there are ways in which science, which we often characterize as author of the systems that are alienating us from humanity, is rich with metaphor that can bring us back into or open up new kinds of relationality with the nonhuman world and in the human world. And I wonder as we listen also to Cyn talk about the structures of relations that are the Indigenous modes of knowing in her community that are enacted and that are known through their enactment, through their stories, and through their ceremonies, and the way in which—in conversation before this day today, when I've spoken with Cyn and asked about how her community thinks about climate crisis, talks about climate crisis, she said to me, we don't really talk about climate crisis. We talk about what ceremonies are called for, and we talk about what is inhibiting or prohibiting ceremonies that we need, whether because of questions of land access or questions of continuity of culture that are disrupted. And I listened to Naomi talk about what memory is and the complexity of—the possibility of engaging the true complexity of memory within a genuinely diverse culture and a genuinely diverse community. And I wonder, listening to the three of you, as you've been thinking about these issues and talking about them amongst yourselves and with others over the course of the year, how you imagine a different kind of relation between these three bodies of knowledge and practice, the governmental, the scientific, and the Native or Indigenous. How do you begin to bring what you're thinking about in terms of relationality and storytelling and the encounter with diversity that our world necessitates? It's part of what we are living. How do you think about actually opening those in action to each other in different ways that respect and transform the integrity of different modes of knowing as they come into contact with each other? And I'd say, because, Teresa, you started first. \[CHUCKLES\] TERESA CAVAZOS COHN: \[INAUDIBLE\], yeah? SARABINH LEVY-BRIGHTMAN: It's a real question, yeah. I wonder where the three of you are on this. And I know you've been thinking about some of this with the relationship between scientists and scientists moving into and out of and working along with different communities, including Indigenous communities in this country. TERESA CAVAZOS COHN: Yeah, I'm going to give you, since I'm on the spot, the first thing that comes to mind. Some of you will know, especially students who are here, that I have this love of maps. And I think of them about this sort of symbolic level of story. And if you can shift a map, you can shift everything. And when we think about even a Bears Ears map or a landscape map, the way you draw those boundaries, and who draws those lines? Who gets to make the decisions about how the lines are drawn? All those are really interesting to me and powerful in a governance space. And I have, I should say, a PhD student right now who's working with Nez Perce lands. And I mean, it sounds so mundane, but she's working with Nez Perce lands to figure out how, in forest management planning documents, we can draw better maps that better reflect Indigenous perceptions of space. How do we show something on a map that's treaty rights that have existed—that represent relationships from time immemorial on a map, in a document that sits on a million shelves or computers. But it's an incredibly important document for, if you're in the Western United States, the majority of lands within some of these Western states, by a long shot. So these government spaces can be incredibly integrated, as you were thinking about. It's so interesting to me to think about. I'm not sure I've ever thought about genealogy in something like a forest service planning document, but what does that look like? And what is the shape of time in some of these documents? And in speaking from the scientific space, what does it look like when you can accommodate a textured and nuanced time, rather than a more specific and linear time. So that's a circuitous way of saying, I'm thinking about maps. And where is science in maps? Where are Indigenous spaces in maps? What's the role of governance in maps? And how can they be used? That's what we're really thinking about, fundamental shifts in epistemologies. How can they become a tool in helping us reshape—you know, Rebecca Solnit—not looking for things we don't have, but reshaping the things that are present and here. And how can we engage with them differently? CYNTHIA WILSON: I think, for me, what came to mind was the question of, who holds power when we're thinking about climate? And oftentimes, people don't understand that climate holds the power and that, as humans, were only secondary occupying the space temporarily for a short period of time. And we don't have power for an earthquake, or we don't have a power for a thunderstorm. And those are response to our actions of us occupying the space. And even when I think about power in government structure, even within tribal governments, there's still a lot of changes that has to happen. And the way the system is structured, the tribal governments in consultation with the DC government, they call that consultation. But there's a disconnection with the voices of the communities, of our knowledge holders, medicine people, those who hold the practical lived experiences of maintaining those connections with those that hold a higher power who are more than human. And so there's no consultation with the community level, so that's a gap in the way communication flows. And our tribal government mimics the government structure of the Washington, DC, office, so it's still like a colonial process. And they say we're sovereign, but we're still under Federal Reserve land by the federal government. So that's not sovereign to me. So politically, there's still a lot of work within itself and the reason why we haven't seen much things happen for those of us that are still living in teaching this knowledge. So I think those are big challenges in yeah, well, I'm looking \[CHUCKLES\] for answers. I'll hand it over to Naomi. NAOMI WASHINGTON-LEAPHEART: All I need is one mic. OK, no. I really appreciate this discussion of time and marking time. I think that government is invested in—it's almost like time that hasn't been created yet. I mean, we're talking constantly about projections and forecasts and to the exclusion of people's lived reality. Like, at 1:00 today, am I going to be able to eat? At 6:00 PM today, am I going to be able to help my kid with their homework? So government has something to learn about keeping time in ways that are not so future focused that we dismiss the importance of now. We had a conversation. I think it was a tangent. We were talking about hope and the architectures of hope, the language of hope that is so future facing, even notions of safety and security. We're talking about public safety in Philly all the time, and it's like this future focus. We don't think about what it means to be secure right now, not at some future moment. And so I think that there are possibilities for government to relate to time differently so that we don't sacrifice the present in service to a future that is not even imaginable. I think we in government sacrificed a lot in the name of the future. And I think we do a lot of harm to bodies today, to plan it today as a result. And so I would just love to think about, similarly, Teresa, when you're talking about maps as key, I wonder about clocks or some sort of way to figuratively talk about time in City Hall that honors these ways of knowing and understanding time, of understanding space. So that's what's on my mind. And again, it's very woo-woo. I can't go to a meeting and be talking about the architectures of time. \[LAUGHTER\] They won't get that. So how do we—\[LAUGHS\] So there's a lot to do, I think, in even reimagining what governance even is, what we're even here to do as government professionals. So yeah. SARABINH LEVY-BRIGHTMAN: I think it is now time to open to questions and comments from the room and open up the conversation a little bit wider. ANNA: Thank you all so much. My name is Anna, and I've been part of the team that helped to put this week together. And just, ooh, I'm soaking in so much of your wisdom. Thank you. And just to pick up on that last line of, it's woo-woo, I think something I struggle with in more secular spaces or government spaces is how to bridge—how to bring these conversations or the richness of this week to folks that might not have that language. So if you have any advice on how you're doing that, I would love to hear it. NAOMI WASHINGTON-LEAPHEART: I think that I have had some creative latitude because the city at least saw it important to invest in an office of faith-based and interfaith affairs to which I could be appointed, was at least taking seriously the transactional possibilities for relationships with religious communities and put somebody in place to engage in those transactions. And I choose to embody the world in a way that is not transactional, but that seeks to bring some of this woo-woo-ness into government. And what has happened is it started with COVID, emergency response. It started with me saying, Hi, Mr. Health Commissioner. It was Mr. at the time. It's now Ms. Health Commissioner. I know you're giving these COVID updates to people every day, and you're reading the numbers of people who died. And that feels really important. And what the hell are you doing? You can't just get on TV and read the death toll and then say, good luck. Wear your masks. That doesn't take seriously bodies. It doesn't take seriously the ways of knowing and ways of being that are thoroughly embodied. You need to have somebody come before the people and say something to their hearts, something to their anxious minds. You need to have somebody care about the loss. We have to hear about this loss daily. So it started with me challenging the way we were being and doing government in the midst of a global pandemic. How can you just be concerned about communicating the science of how a virus is transmitted? That's really important. And people are losing it, and you need to be able to lead in a way that takes seriously that reality. And that turned into my being able to build trust and respect with my city colleagues, who now call me to bring the woo-woo to that meeting or this policy conversation. But it took my saying to them, with this, I guess, opportunity of the crisis of COVID, we have to think about governance differently. So I think governments having the presence of mind to at least care about relationship with religious communities, people of faith, and then nurture a spirit of care as a first response, care as a driver of policymaking. So I'm abundantly grateful that I live in a city, I work in a city that invested in that way. I don't know if others have ideas, too. TERESA CAVAZOS COHN: I can maybe speak to that a little bit of a different way. And I want to acknowledge RPL here, too, and the work of this space. You're saying you can't show up in government meetings and speak like this. Do I speak like this in my college? No way. This is a space in which—it's a space of integration that Diane's vision and others have created. And so I think all of the fellows have really benefited from thinking about, how does this belong in the law school? How do we take this to government? What does it look like? And also, supporting us in these wild integrations. I took Donna Haraway last semester to my PhD natural resource students. So these are students who are studying permafrost. And I'm asking them to think about, yeah, philosophers are badmouthing science. How do you feel about this? \[LAUGHTER\] How does this sit with you? And that's been a really refreshing space. I had a total teaching failure three weeks ago when I tried to talk about, with my undergrads, the shape of a story in the middle of this—I think we were in atmosphere, didn't work. But still, it's like having the daring to try and do this kind of integration in these spaces, where things don't fit. And I do think that, over the past two years, having this support to know that other folks are out there doing this crazy stuff, too, in a space to talk about it every couple of weeks to check in and say, I had this utter failure. It's been really a support. So one of my answers would be, I think it's being modeled here. This is a space and a way in which this is happening. Yeah. And I think in another way, too—speaking to having visited Cyn in her world, academic spaces are an illusion in some ways. When you're in a community on the ground, the world doesn't divide up like this. People are integrated people outside of these strangeness, where I can say, can you walk over to chemistry. And you could actually get up and do that thing. Whereas if you're in Bears Ears, and I say, walk to chemistry, it's irrelevant. So I think our problem isn't just integrating the Academy. It's making the Academy relevant to the rest of the world in ways that make sense. SARABINH LEVY-BRIGHTMAN: Time for one more question. SPEAKER 3: Thanks to all of you and to the organizers. I come from a climate policy background. I've worked in government for about 15 years. And I have tried to start having these conversations and crack the door open on the burnout that I'm seeing among colleagues, clients, peers, working in this space to say, I think this is a lot of unprocessed grief from treating these reports and these numbers like the body counts and COVID of what we're actually dealing with versus how we engage with it. And I see a dawning recognition in people's eyes and then a deer in the headlights of like, oh, god, I can't actually do that, because it will destroy me. And so wondering if any of you have comments on religious frameworks that we could try to reimbue into our communities that have lost ritual and community spaces and provide people pathways for how to actually have this conversation? NAOMI WASHINGTON-LEAPHEART: Thank you so much for that question. I love it. In Philly, we have partnered with a community-based organization that is staffed with volunteer grief doulas. And I bring them to City Hall and let them do their thing. We have grief parades. Imagine folk coming out of their houses in West Philly to walk the streets with other folks who are grieving. And we engage in ritual around that grief, around naming it, around sharing it so that the weight is not so heavy. And again, when I first brought this to my manager, when I was first hired, she was like, why not? What? Is this part of your job? What? Deer in headlights—you know. But to have my colleagues, the budget people, and the procurement office people, and the—let themselves fall apart. It has been a gift both to me and to them, I think, to have our mayor, who is the definition of like surly—like, he doesn't \[LAUGHS\] cry. What? He doesn't. But to have him choke up now in meetings, which is like, is he—is he—talking about the spring weather, I sit on the teams, and I say, yes, my work here is done. So I guess that's a long way for me to say, there are communities that want to hold the grief, want to create space for. And again, that's about remembering what we used to do. For me, I come out of a Black Christian tradition, where there was a mourner's bench. People who were like, we will hold the—bring us your—come to me all who are heavy. Rest here. We needed that. We knew we needed that. We needed people to help us manage the fires. I want you to know I'm going to preach that. I just want you to know, those questions that you asked. So knowing that communities already have this input. Communities have known that they need somebody in the community to help with the grief, somebody in the—that woman in the community that everybody knows they can go to when they're—communities know. But somehow, in government, we think, oh, that's not necessary. So I'm rambling now, but I think it can be done. I think it can be done. SARABINH LEVY-BRIGHTMAN: I wonder also about the very structure of, you're describing grieving, or you're describing this held grief that maybe has not being grieving, where grieving isn't happening in response to people who are sitting with the data and sitting with the numbers. And I think back to what you were saying about COVID. I also think back to what so many people and so many children across this country experienced during COVID, where learning was turned further and further into data delivered to bodies, locked in rooms. And it just makes me think about the call to be in daily relation to the land in the present, and the very simple reality that meaning is something that is experienced in the present and meaninglessness is something that is experienced in the present. And it's not to say, we shouldn't plan for the future. But that alienation is something that is held in a body in the present moment. And it really raises a question of how we are living in the present. And I hear Naomi talking about the importance of people gathering together in grief to grieve, but it also raises the question of, really, we talk about land acknowledgment. But what is each person or each community, as small or large as they may be, daily, in-and-out actual relationship with the nonhuman living and nonhuman earthly and nonhuman atmospheric world around them? And what are the practices that can come into being for different people and different communities that actually put them into or open in them or open them relationally to the growing world that is being lamented or not grieved or the fears around it and the recognition that those fears are one thing? But one thing they may also call for is a very different—as all three of these women have been talking about—I think a very different actual lived present. SUSAN O. HAYWARD: The conversation will continue, but we're going to take a pause for now. Let's take a moment to thank our wonderful— \[APPLAUSE\] SPEAKER 2: Sponsor, Religion and Public Life. SPEAKER 3: Copyright 2023, The President and Fellows of Harvard College. See also:- [ Religious Literacy and the Professions ](/news/religious-literacy-and-professions) - [ RPL Past Events ](/news/rpl-past-events)