# Video: Examining the Religious and Spiritual Implications of Climate Change July 24, 2023 ![Climate Justice Week](/sites/g/files/omnuum8216/files/styles/hwp_16_9__480x270/public/rpl/files/climate_justice_week.jpg?h=8889ceb5&itok=FANtLVMm) On April 14, 2023, Religion and Public Life hosted a conversation featuring Terry Tempest Williams, Matt Ichihashi Potts, Rev. Vernon K. Walker, and Anna Del Castillo who examined the religious and spiritual implications of climate change. What role does religion play in the movement for climate justice? How can religious communities serve as sites of organizing and activism? Panelists discussed these questions through the lenses of religious literacy, climate grief, climate ministry, and practices to guide communities through the perils of climate catastrophe. FULL TRANSCRIPT SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School. SPEAKER 2: Climate Justice Week Keynote Conversation. Examining the Religious and Spiritual Implications of Climate Change. April 14, 2023. VERNON K. WALKER: All right. All right. Well, first of all, before we delve into that, I would like to extend my gratitude for being here with so many accomplished panelists and here with you all. Elephant happy and hippopotamus glad to be here and dialogue with you all. As we consider the pressing question of climate justice and as we consider the pressing question of climate change, what do we do? How do we prepare? How do we reduce our carbon footprint? Et cetera. So what we found at Cru to foster independence to answer that question specifically is we focus on how extreme weather impacts people's community. We know that climate change has been very politicized. And we know that because of the politicization of climate change, communities are often left behind. Communities, particularly underserved and low-income communities are disproportionately experiencing the impact of extreme weather. So our approach is rooted in the idea that we ought to be-- or in the idea of climate adaptation. So the way I think about the climate justice movement is we have the mitigation approach, which includes but not limited to those who are pushing for a Green New Deal, those who are pushing for plastic bans, those who are pushing for the, pardon me, the shutdown of power plants, et cetera. Then we have the adaptation perspective, where we know that we will continue to experience tornadoes, hurricanes, extended heat waves, et cetera, because the climate crisis is not new. In fact, the global temperature has been gradually increasing since the Industrial Revolution in which coincides with when humanity started to rely on fossil fuels. So for us at Cru, we focus on ensuring people have the resources to deal with extreme weather. And oftentimes, people, particularly in underserved communities are not thinking about the danger that extreme heat has for an example. So during the summer, we have best practices to stay cool workshops, where we have done these in places such as Dorchester, Mattapan, Brockton. And we partner with Mass General Hospital and several local organizations within the communities I've just named to invite community members to come to a workshop to, not only learn best practices to stay cool, but also have an opportunity to win an energy efficient air conditioning unit and also, to receive cooling kits. And the reason that we focus on underserved communities is because as we mentioned, these communities are disproportionately harmed. And at these particular workshops, we provide meals and opportunities for attendees to get to network and to know each other. We encourage people to talk to each other because we believe, at Cru, the best way to become climate resilience is through social resilience. And there is some research to back this up. Some of you all may remember and some of you may not, but there was an extraordinary, devastating heat wave in Chicago in 1995. 739 folks died, y'all, over five days. And there was a bevy of research that has come forth from those experiences, and I'm just going to lift up one. So Eric Klinenberg, who's a sociologist at NYU, published a book, and it's called, Heat Wave, A Social Autopsy of the Disaster in Chicago. And he found that neighbors that were socially isolated were those who suffered the most. Those who were disconnected from their community members-- he did a block by block analysis. And he found that those who were just in total isolation, they tended to die. So for us, the way in which we go about organizing is through Cru teams. So these are neighborhood teams of volunteers that are interested in building the social infrastructure in a community. So we're currently in talks with a couple of different folks and different cities to this Cru team. In fact, we had one in Somerville that was doing a whole lot of climate socials and before the pandemic and events around building social resilience. And essentially, that's how we go to organize interdependence in communities. We try to take the approach that extreme weather is happening. This is how you prepare for it because we have talked to Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. But that has been our approach with on the grassroots saying that, let's build social bonds together so we can be able to survive these extreme weather events. Here in Boston, we have heat waves. We have floods. We have extreme winter, et cetera. So essentially, that's how we go about organizing and building interdependence. ANNA DEL CASTILLO: I love that at the root of it, it is just human connection and building those conversations. VERNON K. WALKER: That is a great question. And I think the way that to build this coalition is to build around our commonalities. And we have found through our work at Cru in our hubs program-- we have a 122 hubs across the country. And hubs are organizations such as libraries, faith communities, nature centers, et cetera. We have found, the way to build coalitions, is to focus on in so many ways, the Golden Rule, "Do unto others as you want done to yourself." So we found that if we place human well-being, if we place safety at the center of organizing around and building coalitions, we have found great success with in working with our partners across the country. I now lift up one example we have a partnership with St. Stephen's Episcopal Church here in the South End, and we partnered. There one of our hubs, and all our hubs are on our website, but we partnered with them last year last May. And we as I mentioned a little bit earlier about the best practices, the Stay Cool workshop, we provided AC units. We provided cooling kits, and we also had meals. And the reason we focused on that community is because traditionally, communities, underprivileged communities are often communities that suffer from urban heat islands, which in essence means there's more concrete, asphalt, black roofs that make the community much more hotter than areas that have more green space. So I think for us, the way to build that coalition is to keep the main thing the main thing, whatever the issue is. Because we live in a diverse world, we have so many different beliefs. It really fundamentally comes down to treating your neighbor right, right? And I think all world religions can agree on being a good neighbor. And while there may be different conceptions on what it means to be a good citizen and what it means to be devout-- and religious practices look different. However, I think if we focused on the commonality-- Dr. King said that, "We're all tied in the inescapable garment of mutuality. What affects one directly affects us all indirectly." And then he went on to say that, "I can't be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be." And he was saying that in the context of the Birmingham letter while he was in prison. And White clergymen were criticizing him for being in Birmingham, but he said, hey injustice anywhere is the threat to justice everywhere, and that's why I'm here. And I think if we can see that we're all tied in an inescapable garment of mutuality, I think that's how we can build solidarity and relationship. And I think COVID has taught us that. COVID started allegedly, supposedly in Wuhan, China and has traveled across the world. And unfortunately, over 6 million people have died. Over a million people in America have died, but it shows that we're tied in as a global family, and we're interconnected. So I think if we can approach this, then we can approach climate justice in a way where we need to fight for climate justice. And we need to center the idea of being environmental-- practicing environmental stewardship and being a good Samaritan one to another. ANNA DEL CASTILLO: Thank you so much for that reminder of our interconnectedness. Matt, this week, to no one's surprise, grief has been a central theme and come up in many conversations. And I know here, at the Divinity School, you taught one of the most popular classes. I had so many friends that tried to get into your apocalyptic Grief class and couldn't, which I think is really telling. So I'm wondering if you and speak to a question which is, "What are the ethical implications of grief?" MATTHEW ICHIHASHI POTTS: Thanks, Anna. Sure. Yeah, so I'm not a scholar of environment. I've been working in questions around grief in my theological work since I came here as a master's degree student. And it's only because I'm a human person and I listened to the news. And I know about the reality of our future that these questions of grief are starting to turn to the questions of environment. And also, because Terry Tempest Williams came to Harvard in 2017, and we talked to then taught a class together. And so now I'm starting to turn my research towards how, what I think about grief might inform our response to the present and the future. So when I was a doctoral student here, we have to do these general exams. There's a whole bunch of books we have to read, and we forget most of what we read. But one of the things that I really remembered, one of the thinkers that really stuck with me, and whose voice has recurred in my work since is the writer Judith Butler. And there were a couple of writings of theirs in particular. One is a book of ethics called Giving Account of Oneself, which tries to route ethics in a sense of the loss of oneself, of a loss of selfhood, which is not the way Western ethics tends to think about itself. And then another is an essay called Precarious Life, where Butler writes about the relationship between love and grief. She actually uses the language of desire and grief mostly. I'm a Christian, so I put love on the desire. That may not be fair to Butler, but it's what I'm going to talk about now. And the point she makes that is that she says, we can tell who we love or what we love by whether we would grieve it if we lost it. And in fact those things go together fundamentally. Now, this essay she was writing was in the particular context of the AIDS crisis, the AIDS epidemic in the United States, and also it was immediately after Abu Ghraib in Iraq. And she was calling attention to the people we have failed to grieve as a sign of who we do not love, right? But she also extends this to the nonhuman world, right? We can pay-- we know who we don't love by who we don't grieve, and we know who we love by who we would grieve. I see people's heads nodding. I think this is true to our own experience, right? This is a story I tell a lot. When my first child was born, the first time I held her in my arms, I had two emotions flooding me simultaneously. The one was this utter joy at her existence, and the other was utter terror. And the fact that I could not keep her alive forever and keep her safe forever, right? Those things go together. Now, why is this important to me as a theologian? And how might I want to-- how am I trying to imagine now how to turn my gaze or turn my scholarly attention towards the climate and environmental issues we face? It's important to me, and I'm persuaded by this argument that love and loss go together. Love and grief go together in this fundamental way, and they actually can't be sundered from one another. That is not the tack that the traditional Christian story takes when thinking about the relationship between love and grief. In most of the dominant kind of theological tradition, what we say is, no, what you love you don't have to lose. What you love, you won't need to grieve. And it can be restored to you and kept to you forever, right? And what I would like to do is try to rethink the Christian tradition. And in the other writing I did prior to the writing I'm starting to do now around environment is try to rethink other practices, sacramental practices, ethical practices like forgiveness, and turn it away from the fantasy that our love can make things perfect forever and stable and safe forever. And rather, turn our moral practices towards the idea that we have to let go of things. One of my parishioners at the Memorial Church sent me a poem by Wendell Berry this week, which is lovely. It comes from his Sabbaths Poems from 2003. And I'll try to remember this line, but he says, "Death is our illusion. Our wish to be only for ourselves, which is also our freedom to kill one another." That when we have the fantasy that we can make ourselves safe in the future and ourselves safe in the future, we start to expend this others, take advantage of others, exploit others, extract from the natural world. So that we can create the fantasy of ourselves in perpetuity, right? What I want us to do, what I'm hoping to do in my forthcoming work in thinking about ethics and grief is turn to the question of climate grief. The first question is the one that Vernon raised, right? Often in context, especially like contexts like here at Harvard, the question of climate crisis is a future-oriented question. To me, that's a moral, ethical grief problem because that raises the question of who we are not grieving today, who is suffering today from the already effects of climate change. Right? So grieving appropriately would get us to help us to pay attention morally, appropriately in the present moment for those people who are already suffering, already being harmed from climate change, as well as a position as towards our future in a different way-- give us a different relationship to our future. So these are the questions I'm thinking about and the way I'm starting to think about these things. It also gets caught up. These questions of grief and loss also get caught up in questions of hope and courage, and so forth, which are other things I think we need to talk about, and which I think Anna is going to ask me about. ANNA DEL CASTILLO: Oh, yeah. There's so much there. And this week, another theme has been time. I the panel right before this-- we talked about time, and in Angelo's workshop, we've talked about time. So thank you for rooting us in the present suffering that exist. So history has shown us that in times of crisis, humans turn to spiritual leaders and in the crisis that our Earth is facing, people need hope and courage. Can you speak to the relationship between hope and courage? And also, how do you help your students and congregation find hope and courage? MATTHEW ICHIHASHI POTTS: Yeah, so I think the way I'm trying to do that-- I don't know if it's working, right? But the way I'm trying to do it is invite us into this productive fruitful-- missing the wrong word-- but productive, creative, mature relationship with grief, which is, again, I think not something that historically and theologically Christians are great at. The hope and courage thing is interesting because I've been really interested in this relationship for the past few weeks because of a speaker we recently had here at the Divinity School. The church hosted a series of speakers this year, and a woman named Dekila Chungyalpa, who is a Tibetan activist, who works with religious leaders to do a lot of the work that Vernon is talking about, who's situated in Madison, Wisconsin, came here to the Divinity School and gave a talk. And a person asked a question and asked a version of a question I hear it almost every kind of climate crisis talk I go to, which is, "Where do you find hope?" This person asked Dekila, "Where do you find hope?" And she said, I think that's the wrong question. I think the right question is where do you take courage? Where do you find courage because the future that we face is one that will take courage, right? I think there's a relationship between hope and courage. I think hope is one of the things that gives us courage, but I think that reframing is important. Again, one of the things that I think that I want to complicate in my own work, especially about hope-- hope is really important in the Christian tradition. Right? It's one of the three theological virtues that Paul talks about in Romans and 1 Corinthians-- faith, hope, and love. Right? And hope gets a lot of play, and people talk a lot about hope. I think, however, that thinking about hope as a kind of simple or empty optimism is problematic and destructive. And I'm not the first person to say this, but when your hope is like an ideology, which assures you that the future will be safe and secure as long as we have things like faith and love, that gets dangerous because I'm not sure that that's true. And if we look at folks who suffer, look at folks who do face risky futures, look at people like Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement, those folks didn't talk about hope that way. They didn't when John Lewis was on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, he didn't think that the people on the other side of that bridge were going to treat him well when he arrived there. It wasn't optimism, right? Hope in that context, when those folks talk about hope, they say something more like that you believe that the value for which you are standing up is worth standing up even if it doesn't turn out the way justice ought to have it turn out. Even if it doesn't go the way you want it to go, right? Hope means believing that value is of sufficient worth to cause you to face the future with courage. A future you have to be realistic about, right? And the hope is the thing that gives you courage because the values are more important than the risks you face, right? What that means for us in my Christian community or in our classroom, that's something that has to be worked out because the weight of this crisis bears out, as has been said already-- bears out differently on people, depending upon their privilege and their position. And so what courage's we need, what we need to face, how we need to do these things is different. But I think it's really important for us to think about that relationship between hope and courage to keep us from empty optimism and to redirect us towards the more stirring kind of hope that allows us to face a future and walk into that future with courage. ANNA DEL CASTILLO: Thank you so much for that. And I have a feeling courage will be something that we continue to talk about. Terry, you started the Constellation Project whose mission is to explore the spiritual crisis that underlies the ecological and public health crises associated with destruction's of Earth's natural systems. And you explore the spiritual implications of climate change here at the Divinity School. I know you've inspired many of us to think about that. So my first question, what are the spiritual implications of climate change? TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: My heart is pounding. I just want to say, thank you for your leadership. It's such a beautiful thing to see this from the ground up with the student leaders. And I also want to just acknowledge \[INAUDIBLE\] because I think she's been carrying this vision for a very long time, and it's beautiful to see this in fruition. And it is daunting to sit with two preachers. \[LAUGHTER\] It is. And I lastly, we want to say how meaningful it is to have two of my neighbors here from the Colorado Plateau and that Cynthia Wilson and Angelo Baca. So it's wonderful to be able to share this moment and your generosity. Two things. One, I'll back up. It was 2016. I had been invited to Harvard. It was the first time I'd ever been here. I had just been fired from my job for purchasing oil and gas leases. And I was very tender and raw. And I gave a talk at the environmental forum in the humanities. And all I can tell you is that when it was over, everyone ran out like tripping over each other. And I had a friend, Tim Dechristopher, who was a student here. Many of you will remember him, who had served two years in prison for purchasing oil and gas leases. And he was hysterically laughing. You know? And when it was over I just walked out alone, and there was a Dr. Sam Myers standing there, waiting. And the last thing I remember saying was a conversation with Doug Peacock, who protects grizzly bears, and we had been at his place. He lives on the other side of Yellowstone National Park, and the wolverine had just been denied protection under the Endangered Species Act. So it was a sad day. And a storm was gathering, and I remember saying, you know, what do we do? And he said, Terry, we lose nothing by loving. And I've never forgotten that. And that's really been the driving force. So it was about love. And Dr. Sam Myers who runs the Planetary Health Alliance said, I'm Sam Myers, I'm a physician, and I work here at Harvard, and I think you need to know we don't do love at Harvard. \[LAUGHTER\] And I said, good to know. And I thought, this is exactly where we need to be. And then he went on about how uncomfortable he was and really gave this incredible takedown of what we've been discussing. And I remember saying, Sam, what are you feeling right now? And he said, did you not hear me? We don't do feeling neither. And he said, what am I feeling? I feel like I have the Grand Canyon in my chest-- this chasm. And when I was invited to come back in 2017, I met with Sam, and we both realized we had something to learn from each other as a scientist, as a writer, and more importantly, how does spirituality bridge this gap between us? And I think it's a story that the internal landscape and the external landscape are brought together through story. That story reminds us of the umbilical cord-- what connects us to the past, present and future. It keeps things known. When someone tells a story, we become accountable for that knowledge which has been shared. It belongs to the community. When I met with Dean Hempton, you can imagine the nerves. And he asked me one question, he said, what question do you bring to us? What question do you bring to us? And I hadn't thought about that, but I learned two things from him in that moment. One, you are expected as a member of this community to bring something of value to us in the name of reciprocity. And what I said was, Dean Hempton, I'm interested-- perhaps, the question I bring to you is, what are the spiritual implications of climate change? Because that was my struggle. And after I had been fired, I realized this wasn't a political issue. This wasn't even an ecological issue alone but a spiritual one, and that I needed to be on my knees in humility to think about what that entails. And for me, it has to do with commitment. What do we commit our lives to? What are we willing to lay down our life for? Community. Who do we stand with and stand for? How do we support one another? Because we can't do it alone. Each of us is holding a piece of the mosaic. I think it has to do with collaboration. I know there are times when I wake up in the morning, and I think, I cannot do this. But that in that moment is the limits of my own imagination. But imagination is shared, create collaboration, and in collaboration, we create community. And in community, anything is possible. And creativity. How do we disturb? How do we-- I remember during the Great Peace March. There was a rabbi standing on a boulder in Shivwits Land and the reservation there outside of Las Vegas. He was in a three-piece suit, and he looked at us. And he said, three words, "Make me uncomfortable." I come from a culture that is very polite, and I think it's important for us to disturb. I think that's also a spiritual implication of climate. Climate is disturbing. It's disturbance. And I think that this is an Earth crisis, not just a climate crisis. When it's climate crisis, I think we can abstract that it's whether. We know that. It has real ramifications. But when we think about the Earth crisis, it's all of our crisis. And I think that's a spiritual implication of how do we serve one another? How do we bolster ourselves so that we don't look away? And I think that's about bearing witness. ANNA DEL CASTILLO: Thank you for that. It is an Earth crisis. And I think at Harvard and more broadly, and institutions of power, there are a lot of interventions to address the Earth crisis, whether that's public policy-- science. All of them are really important, but I see you creating an intervention through stories and storytelling. So my question to you is for our audience members, how might they think about their own story and using their story as a tool to do justice work? TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: Such a good question. I think we each have to find our own way, and it's not easy. I was thinking, Matt, when we talked together, this was new. And you gave me permission to be sad because you were saying, hope isn't what we think it is. And it really was there that I believe that there is something deeper than hope, and our stories of witness bear truth to that. I think here at Harvard, it's been my experience that we do not privilege story, that it's viewed as soft headed, that it doesn't have the intellectual rigor, and I don't believe that. And I think that was one of the things that we all learned together as a community with weather reports is that every single person had a story to tell. And in that telling is an authenticity, a toughness, and an inspiration. I mean and all of us will remember Bernadette when she said, will you believe me that the grief I feel over the murder of my son, because of the collapse of our community, our Native community, is the same grief I feel at the loss of the caribou herd? And I think she put us all on notice of what are our relations? So I think it's for us to really think about, what is the story that locates our grief? What is the story that locates our place? What is the story that locates our love? And how do we tell that story that lifts community, so that it bypasses rhetoric and pierces the heart? And I think that's really the focus for me is, what allows us to feel most alive in the world? Please tell me your story, and I will tell you mine, and we are bound together forever. ANNA DEL CASTILLO: Well, that is a perfect segue into our audience questions and responses or stories. So now, I want to open it up to you all. Yeah, I'll pass around the mic. AUDIENCE: This is less of a question and more of like an open-ended prompt. But I was hoping that you could just, especially Matt, talk a little bit more about the difference between hope and optimism, especially like for those of us who are on the ground doing this climate work, and what it can feel like. I would just really love to hear your thoughts a little bit more on what you see as the difference between the two ways of being. MATTHEW ICHIHASHI POTTS: Yeah, right, because I don't presume to know. I wouldn't \[AUDIO OUT\] right to tell you what your experience is. I think what worries-- I'll tell you more about what worries me. This is buzzing a lot? Is that right? Is this OK? Let me tell you more about my worries. \[AUDIO OUT\] no? \[INAUDIBLE\]. Let me tell you more about my worry about optimism, and then we can talk about hope. My worry about optimism is that maybe like numb for a day or two, but in no case did anyone throw up their hands and say, well, then nothing matters. I guess, right? In every case with the time they had left, they did everything they could to make the time they had matter, right? And not because they thought they were going to beat it, but because they hoped. There was hope. There is a reason there that they couldn't really articulate, that meant every single day matters to do all we can even if we can't win this. Even if survival is not really an option, we are going to work at this and work on it and not give up until I'm in the ground. This is what I mean about turning people toward grief. I think we have this in our life. We know people in our own lives. This is maybe happen to us and people we know and love who have this kind of courage. The kind of courage to look to a future like dead in the face and understand exactly what the implications are and then to keep going for the people they care about, for the issues and values they care about. I don't know how to theologise that as hope. I'm still trying to figure it out, but that's what I want to call hope-- those people who keep going even when they have no reason to believe the news is going to change. AUDIENCE: All the versions of that. All the versions of the way in which we continue to do that. And I there's a lot of kind of anger associated with that, that comes, that feels tied to this \[AUDIO OUT\]. That can also come along with kind of a \[AUDIO OUT\]. So I'm curious about two things here. One is sort of, how you, as you continue to do the work that you do, how do you think about or confront that sense of every step you take is tiny, but it's very important? You know, it's kind of I find myself sometimes, just stymied by I just feels like the problem is so large that any step I take might be meaningless. And then the second-- these may or may not be related so take them as you will. The second is I very much love what you said about creativity and its power to disrupt. And I'm interested in particular in that and what you were saying about the way in which you're thinking about theology. And in a way, what I heard in that is a disruption of theology, and it kind of takes me back to my personal story. I grew up areligious. And a lot of my anger in that is tied to the religious story that come along with, and I was very much imposed upon me as someone growing up in a very religious society. And that this early question about interfaith. how do we bring people together? That there's a lot of people who are outside of that. And so the second part of that question then is about this, what kind of response do you get to that disruption when you're entering community that has such deep, long ties to this way of thinking? In my mind, those two are connected. \[INAUDIBLE\] again, take them as each one. ANNA DEL CASTILLO: \[INAUDIBLE\] also had the opportunity \[INAUDIBLE\] TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: Thank you for your comments. We've been talking about courage, and the definition I'm most comfortable with is sustained focus. To me, courage is about the long view, and we hear a lot about urgency. And there is urgency, but for me, how do you take on these big projects? Or as you're saying it's overwhelming. You know, I think it's, again, going back to commitment and community, and how we choose to collaborate with the creative gifts that are ours. And the only way I know how to do that is to do it small. And that means for me in many ways, local. The Great Salt Lake is shrinking, is disappearing even in record snow. That, to me, is something I want to speak to, and that's where I feel like I do have courage because I have a sustained focus there. And it is about love, and it is about grief. And it is about calling out a vision that has harmed us by the dominant religion, and that is Brigham Young's edict that, let the desert bloom like a rose. And so I think that has to have serious critique. It needs a radical adjustment, and we organize. And we organize with a lot of different people, Native people, local people in Salt Lake City along the front range, church members, mothers. And it's one step at a time, and it's incremental. So there's that. I also think there are times where you have to put yourself on the line, and it is not easy. And there are consequences, but again, it's the long view. I just found out that the two years Christopher, Tim Dechristopher served in federal prison. That was 15 years ago. We just got news this week that the Bureau of Land Management is now opening oil and gas leases and auctions to conservation buyers to citizens. So that was 15 years ago. That was 8, years ago but things change. So again, it's the long view. And the only thing I really know is if we're present with the land, with each other, with our community, with ourselves, and with this beautiful broken world, we will know what to do. ANNA DEL CASTILLO: Actually, I don't know how time always goes by so fast in these conversations. I want to thank you so much for your questions and to our panelists. And I thought we could close with each of you just sharing one line in what you're taking away from today's conversation, or it could be a one line blessing or a word of wisdom for the audience but just one line. What are you taking from today? VERNON K. WALKER: Well, the one line that I think about is that we are stronger together than we are apart. And when we break down, the artificial divisions that divide our humanity, the divisions, whether that be political ideology or religious ideology, fundamentally, we have more in common than we have differences. And I think if we can organize and mobilize around those commonalities, then I think we can build a powerful, powerful force to create what Dr. King talked about, the beloved community. So that's the three lines that I'm taking away. \[LAUGHTER\] MATTHEW ICHIHASHI POTTS: Yeah, I'm taking two or three. Awesome. I think my-- to answer your other question, I think about the small things. My family lives here on campus in a house. And we have the recycling bins, and we turn off the lights. And then I look behind us at the science building, where the lights are all on, and there's refrigeration units there. They are \[INAUDIBLE\] right? And I think about what is the-- I mean, what am I doing? This is nothing compared. I think this is why spirituality is important because I take that as a spiritual practice to remind myself that I am small. Right? I think the problem behind a lot of extractive capitalism in general and a lot of what's wrong within the Christian tradition is we elevate ourselves up into thinking we are the most important thing. Actually, this is a reminder that I am part of something very big. And that is actually the right posture to take towards other people and the natural world, if we are going to make the changes that we need to make. So as frustrating as that can be, it's like a gracious irritant. It's like a gracious frustration that reminds me of exactly who I am and how big I am and recalibrates, re-situates me with respect to the rest of things, and appropriately situates me. So the final blessing-- that we would see our connectedness to other things within this matrix. TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: Presence. ANNA DEL CASTILLO: Love it. The line that I'm taking is. Make every day / I want to thank you all so much for being with us at today's closing conversation. And just to remind you that we will be having our closing ceremony right after this at 1 PM in the Chapel, and another reminder that we have copies of Rebecca Solnit's book, Not Too Late as gifts to you all for being with us this week and today. Those are at the back of the Chapel. And if we could just get one more round of applause for our amazing conversation partners today. \[APPLAUSE\] It's been a gift, and I hope that everyone leaves feeling connected and a little more courageous and helpful today. Thank you. SPEAKER 2: Sponsor? Religion and Public Life. SPEAKER 1: Copyright 2023. The Presidents and Fellows of Harvard College. See also:- [ Religion, Conflict, and Peace ](/news/religion-conflict-and-peace) - [ RPL Past Events ](/news/rpl-past-events)