Video: Religion in Times of Earth Crisis: Reflecting on Religion in Times of Earth Crisis

June 18, 2024

Religion in Times of Earth Crisis Panel poster

This is the sixth event is the six-part series, "Religion in Times of Earth Crisis.

This session was a discussion among presenters reflecting upon the insights shared throughout the series. In addition to identifying themes and throughlines among sessions, they returned to the overarching questions that framed this collaboration: What can an expansive understanding of religion provide in these times of Earth crisis? What is the role of the study of religion in times of catastrophe?

Panelists:

Mayra Rivera, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Religion and Latinx Studies
Dan McKanan, Ralph Waldo Emerson Unitarian Universalist Association Senior Lecturer in Divinity
Teren Sevea, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies
Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church
Terry Tempest Williams, HDS Writer-in-Residence

Moderated by Diane L. Moore, Associate Dean of Religion and Public Life

This event took place on March 18, 2024.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.

SPEAKER 2: Reflecting on religion in times of Earth crisis. March 18, 2024.

DIANE MOORE: Hello to everyone. I'm Diane Moore, and I'm the associate dean of religion and public life here at Harvard Divinity School. And on behalf of myself and our dean, Marla Frederick, it is my great pleasure to welcome you to our sixth and final conversation in our faculty webinar series entitled religion in times of Earth crisis.

Tonight, we have the privilege of hearing from all of the presenters in the series, who will be in conversation with me and each other about what we've learned in our exploration of our central question, what does the study of religion offer in this time of Earth crisis? This series is co-sponsored by religion in public life, the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability at Harvard University, the Center for the Study of World Religion, HarvardX, and the Constellation Project.

We're so grateful for our co-sponsors for this series of conversations. Please join me as we pause for our Harvard University acknowledgment of land and people. Harvard University is located on the traditional and ancestral land of the Massachusett, the original inhabitants of what is now known as Boston and Cambridge.

We pay respect to the people of the Massachusett tribe, past and present, and honor the land itself, which remains sacred to the Massachusett people. This series is made possible by the tireless and creative efforts of many, many professionals. I want to especially thank my RPL colleagues, Rachelle Swe, Tammy Liaw, Reem Atassi, and Natalie Campbell.

I also want to thank our wonderful colleagues in the office of communications, and especially the amazing artist Kristie Welsh for the beautiful posters that animate this series. Finally, thanks to our IT wizard, Kama Lord.

For those who've joined us for past conversations, you know that this series was inspired by our friend and colleague Mayra Rivera's 2022 American Academy of Religion presidential address, entitled, What is the role of the study of religion in times of catastrophe?

Here's a brief excerpt from that address. We need a more capacious sense of collectivity that can only emerge when we are willing to honor our stories and tell the truth about injustices that have shaped both environmental devastation and responses to it, a world of our many worlds.

The series is also inspired by writer Amitav Ghosh and his most recent book entitled The Nutmeg's Curse. And here is an excerpt from that text. This is the great burden that now rests upon writers, artists, film makers, and everyone else who is involved in the telling of stories. To us falls the task of imaginatively restoring agency and voice to nonhumans.

As with all the most important artistic endeavors in human history, this is a task that is, at once, aesthetic and political. And because of the magnitude of the crisis that besets the planet, it is now freighted with the most pressing moral urgency.

Our plan for this evening is that I will offer some brief introductory remarks and then each of our speakers will share a brief synopsis of their own presentations and a few highlights regarding what they learned from other presenters. Following these remarks and some conversation among us, we will then entertain questions from you, those of you who are in our audience, our audience members.

So please, we invite you during the talk, during our conversation, to pose questions in the Q&A function at the bottom of your Zoom screen. This event is being recorded and will be available on our religion and public life website in the coming days.

Each of our speakers in this series shared their reflections on the question, what is the role of the study of religion in times of Earth crisis? I'm going to ask all five of them to please come on screen now, as I recall their presentation titles and a brief commentary on their presentations just to help situate all of us. And then we'll turn to each of them to offer, again, their own synopsis and brief comments regarding what they picked up and learned from our colleagues here in the room.

Mayra Rivera started us off, who is the Andrew W Mellon professor of religion and Latinx studies here at Harvard Divinity School. And her talk was entitled, A procession of catastrophes. Here, she focused on Hurricane Maria as a case study, both personal and global, and gave specific attention to two works by Puerto Rican visual artist Patrick McGrath Muñíz. She explored the themes of revelation as-- through the lens of apocalypse, the themes of revelation, judgment, and lament.

Dan McKanan, the Ralph Waldo Emerson Unitarian Universalist association senior lecturer in Divinity, followed Mayra's talk with his presentation entitled, Ancestors and climate in our Boston backyard. And this is a quote from Dan's talk, "The Earth crisis is also an ancestor crisis. We cannot be in right relationship with the Earth and with all of our more-than-human neighbors, unless we are also in right relationship with our ancestors."

Teren Sevea, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal professor of Islamic studies, then followed Dan with his presentation entitled, Animal stories in crisis. And Teren brought us-- Dan focused us here in our own Boston backyard very specifically. Teren then brought us to Southeast Asia and introduced us to a long legacy of communities there, beginning in the 18th century and extending to the present, where the kin and ancestors of humans include snakes and tigers and alligators, among many other more-than-human saints.

Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Plummer professor of Christian morals, and Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church, then followed Teren with his presentation entitled, Apocalyptic grief, reckoning with loss, wrestling with hope. Matt reminded us that a failure to grieve is a failure to love, and called on us to move into our grief as a grounding for our ethics. And that hope itself is embodied in our actions, motivated by love, that are good in themselves and not for their expected reward or return.

And finally, Terry Tempest Williams, HDS writer-in-residence, concluded the individual presentations in our series with her talk entitled, The practice of wild mercy, something deeper than hope. Terry, like Dan and Mayra, used a specific and beloved place as a case study to examine the challenges of our times.

Terry's beloved place is Great Salt Lake, as a spiritual being that, like the Earth itself, is, quote, "Eroding and evolving all at once," end quote. She spoke intimately of her history with and love of that being the Great Salt Lake and how that love motivates her.

She reminds us that, quote, "Everyone, every one of us, has their own Great Salt Lake, a place you love that is dying to come back to life." And she urges us to be attentive to our own sacred places and our own sacred beings as motivations, grounded motivations for our work in the world.

All of our presenters evoked specific places, beings, and intimacies that animate them, and that in turn, animates their work. All of them provided rich examples that are counterintuitive to the grand gestures of, quote, "Solutions-driven ideas and technologies aimed at saving humans from ongoing catastrophe." Note saving humans from ongoing catastrophe, which is so much of the energy and focus in our public conversation about the Earth crisis.

All of our presenters provided examples of care and focus that, in Matt's beautiful words, quote, "Confound the logic of extractive capitalism." They all invited us to think more deeply and more capaciously about the structures of thought themselves by inviting us to think in fresh ways about what we think we already know.

I'll close my remarks with another quote from Mayra Rivera from her powerful presentation that opened this series. And again, she spoke about apocalyptic genres, but used them as examples of revelation, as Matt did. So think about apocalypse, not as end of the world, but as revelation.

Apocalyptic genres, as revelation, can help us see the destructive forces at work in the world as it is, forces that may operate slowly, quietly, until we find ourselves on the brink of a catastrophic event or of many. Apocalyptic genres may describe the drama of planetary history and confront us with the troubling history of injustice.

They may disrupt and disturb us, shaking us from the complacency, breaking our enchantment with systems that destroy the Earth. I love that line, breaking our enchantment with systems that destroy the Earth. Yet other genres of revelation may be intimate and subdued, attentive to the weight of the present. They can express lament at what we have already lost, at all we cannot save, acknowledging them in their precious particularity, and invite us to acts of care beyond the usual calculus of returns.

Thank you all for your remarkable presentations, and I look forward, with great excitement, about our conversation this evening. And I'll turn it over to you, Mayra, now for your brief synopsis and reflections. Thank you.

MAYRA RIVERA: Thank you. I'm delighted to be here, and I have to thank you all for organizing this series. It has truly been amazing to be in conversation with my colleagues, and especially I'm looking forward to today.

In terms of the key topics from my talk, I wanted to add something, which is that-- and I share this with Terry, that the talk emerged from this experience of Hurricane Maria. And I remember vividly being in the midst of thinking about it and feeling it and having a conversation with Terry, who encouraged me and pushed me forward to write about it, and I'm deeply appreciative of that.

I was thinking, as I often do in my work, about the intersections of colonialism and environmental destruction, to allow us to understand the long history of environmental destruction and the unequal distribution of the harms. And as a way to also see how confronting the situation, confronting the crisis, requires deep transformation of the structures of the world.

So I wanted to think with revelation and apocalyptic stories as a genre of denunciation of those patterns that destroy the earth, the human and the nonhuman, and to reset it in the realm of human affairs. Its wide and long perspective may challenge us to reckon with the long histories that have accumulated in the Earth and to reckon with our complacency with it.

And I contrasted the mood of apocalypses, Diane already mentioned, with those of lament, not to choose or privilege one over the other, but to try to explore the ways in which they need each other. On the one hand, we need genres of writing and art to recognize the intimate losses that are already-- that are too easily eclipsed by global descriptions of climate change.

But on the other hand, without the critique of the systemic dimensions of ecological devastation, lament risks losing its ethical force. So how do we think about those two together?

And finally, in the talk, I wanted to reflect, and I invite my colleagues to reflect with me, on the ways in which theological imagery may remind us of the generative power of retelling old, tattered stories in new contexts, allowing us to see them differently, and whether we can use them to reactivate the power of religious symbols, to speak to crises that our everyday languages seem barely to reach.

In terms of the collective ideas, Diane has been generously inviting us to reflect on that presidential address. And I like to return to part of it to think about our collective work, and that is precisely what Diane just quoted about needing a capacious sense of collectivity.

And when I was calling or naming that capacious sense of collectivity, I was envisioning a sense of collectivity that does not emerge from the abstract, detached values that are assumed to emerge from nowhere, but rather to construct it from a plurality of stories, and images, and ways of being in the world.

And I see this series as exemplifying a way to do that, from the stories of a hurricane and a dog, the local trees, ancestors, and the people who care for both, of animals, animals saints and their human families and devotees, to the Great Salt Lake, the birds, and other creatures. We learned about the irreducible singularity of places and their communities, as well as the wide patterns of devastation that affect us all.

And more importantly, I think we begin to suggest that approaches to those problems should emerge from the appreciation of each community and what they teach us about ecology. The series also inspired me to think about a new vocabulary, to talk about religion in times of Earth crisis, including charismatic animals, multi-species families, fearless grief, ancestral trees, wild mercy on soul.

And related to this, I am thinking about how religious languages and practices can help produce an epistemic shift that is both aesthetic, affective, and a change in structures of knowledge if we pay attention to those elements that we often dismiss, from our religious traditions, like the centrality of this particular tree, or the claims that there was no place for islands anymore, or the saintliness of a snake. Thank you.

DIANE MOORE: Wonderful. Thank you. Mayra. Any comments from any others here about Mayra's reflections? I just want to say I'm so grateful you just evoked another set of threads that wove throughout all of these presentations in your beautiful and elegant way.

And you set the seeds for that for us in both your AAR talk and your presentation that began our series.

MAYRA RIVERA: Thank you.

DIANE MOORE: And I love how you use then-- or thinking about how your [INAUDIBLE] colleagues' presentations give you new language to think about, about the sacred and the theological. So thank you for that. Anything else before we turn to Dan?

All right, thank you. All right, thank you, Mayra. And Dan, please, again, with the synopsis and then some reflections. Thank you.

DAN MCKANAN: Yeah, thank you so much, Diane, for your leadership in organizing this, Mayra for your vision in calling not only the five of us, but scholars of religion around the country and around the world, to engage in this conversation, and all of you in the audience who've been participating with us over these weeks.

My presentation was part of my ongoing effort to rethink the conservation tradition. So that includes not only efforts to preserve and protect special and unusual places, but also to preserve and protect the ordinary places where we live, work, and play. To think about approaches to conservation that will allow those ordinary places to become, day by day, more biodiverse, even as we, in our ordinary human lives, are fully engaged with them.

And as I've explored the way this has happened in Metropolitan Boston, I discovered that one of the most important tools for fostering biodiversity in the places we inhabit is the religious practice of veneration for ancestors. When we experience the space that surrounds us as full of ancestors, and when we experience our own ancestors as including not only our human kin but all the creatures of multiple species with whom our human kin were in deep symbiotic relationship, when we understand the web of ancestry that surrounds us, we cannot treat the space surrounding us as a resource to be exploited.

We have to treat it as part of the family. And this can be done in all sorts of mundane and practical ways, including the creation of memorials that remind us on a daily basis that we're surrounded by ancestors. And for those among us who may be descended from settler colonialists, this work has a particular flavor because settler colonialism has always involved a breach of covenant with ancestors, both with one's own ancestors and with the ancestors of those people and other species that are directly formed by settler colonialism.

And as I've studied conservation in Massachusetts, I realized that conservation areas in this-- conservation efforts in this place began at the same moment that descendants of settler colonialists were beginning to rethink ancestry. And new practices of ancestral devotion enabled the creation of not only garden cemeteries, but also forest parks in Metropolitan Boston in the 19th century, and that all of the places that I enjoy hiking are the fruits of this transformation of an ancestral devotion.

So that's what I've talked about. And as I listened to the contributions of my colleagues, a thing that I found myself thinking a lot about is, as we strive to honor the rich particularity of the places we inhabit, the diverse places we inhabit, how do we come to terms with the realities, both of Earth crisis and of Earth renewal, sometimes touching our lives simultaneously in our experiences?

So Terry invited us to think about the places that we love that are dying. And when I think of many of the places that I love and that I relate with on a weekly basis, places like Middlesex Fells or the Mystic River, I'm conscious of the ways those places were dying 200 years ago or 50 years ago, and today, are experiencing, in certain respects, some coming back to life.

So 200 years ago, the area that's Middlesex Fells was largely stripped of its native forests. So many species that had once thrived there had been forced out through deforestation. And today, it's on a path, certainly a path that could be turned back, but a path towards regaining some of the qualities of an old growth forest.

50 years ago, the rivers that surrounded the land that I'm on right now, the Charles and The Mystic, were deeply polluted and dammed up in ways that disrupted the lives of the fish that wanted to be in them. And today, both of those rivers are home-- or both of those rivers will welcome, in a few months' time, hundreds of thousands of blueback herring, who through their own efforts and the efforts of humans who love them, are now able to swim to breeding grounds once again.

So how do we acknowledge these experiences that are deeply fragile but also real at the same time as we join Matt and Terry in the work of grieving the places that are right now in that moment of most intense destruction and suffering? So that's a question that I'm living with, and that's what I have right now.

DIANE MOORE: Thank you. Thank you, Dan, again, for bringing us local as a very deep example, as you've done in our previous series on legacies of slavery. And you're practicing similarly what many in the presentation series were inviting us to do. So thank you for that.

Any other comments from anyone on Dan's reflections before we move on?

MAYRA RIVERA: I was thinking-- I welcomed that challenge to think about, how do we incorporate, in our stories, the stories of recovery and even reflourishing? And I think-- it makes me think about all those who, after Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, have returned to recover sustainable agriculture.

Even a lot of people who had moved from the island moved back to try to invest in the health of the local agriculture, et cetera. So I welcome the invitation to think more intentionally about incorporating those stories, as well.

TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: I appreciate what you just said, Mayra. And Dan, as a Westerner, I so appreciate the path of restoration and regeneration that the Northeast, in particular New England, shows us out West.

And I know it in my own body, just having spent time in these last seven years in New England, it's both a heartbreak for me to be away from my home ground, but it's also been a restoration of my spirit in ways of not being confronted all the time with 8 million acres of fire burning through wild lands and homes and neighborhoods in the West.

Or as we talked about, the shrinking Great Salt Lake and just this mega drought that we're in. So, I think just when you think of geographies that we've all brought to bear, we need each other's geographies to show not only what is possible, but what is necessary in terms of relief, restoration, and recovery in the midst of our grief and what we're losing. So I really appreciate that conversation.

DAN MCKANAN: And the geographies are also intertwined. So I can brag about what New England has accomplished, but we haven't been self-sufficient in food or wood products while we've accomplished that. Forests in other places have been destroyed for New Englanders benefit at the same time as New Englanders have enjoyed the return of our forests. So it's very important to be always talking across these distances to understand how we're all in our particular places and all interconnected.

TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: There's one more thing I would like to add because I might forget it. But it seems like one of the themes that we've all brought to bear, and Diane, you've held us to account in this, is what, Mayra, you said about what is required, and that is deep transformation, both of the structures, but the transformation of our souls, the transformation of how we behave and, what does it mean to be human? And I think that's really powerful, even the transformation of our own religious traditions.

DIANE MOORE: That's absolutely-- I'm not going to skip ahead, but I just want to ping that, Matt, that's so much of what you do and have done in your own work, which I'm eager to hear your synopsis in time about reclaiming different dimensions. And what you're asking for, Mayra, too, is, what does it mean to interrogate and reclaim our theological religious traditions, to recognize both their destructive power?

I'll speak as a Christian, particularly destructive power of Christianity and its role in so many of these ecological devastations. But also, of the possibilities and restorative hope. And you use the language, Mayra, of reflourishing, which I just love. What a great term, not just rejuvenation, but reflourishing.

And just a quick comment, Dan, when I first came to Harvard Divinity School as a student, in the age of dinosaurs, in the early '80s, the Charles River was so putrid. The walk around it was toxic to smell. I remember that really vividly.

And I remember talking about reflourishing and watching the-- it had started before I came, but to watch the transformation and the return to health of that beautiful sacred river was just a joy to behold. So you reminded me of that in your comments, so thank you.

OK, well, let's turn to you, Teren. And again, to recall your beautiful, elegant-- you just brought us so vividly, both to Southeast Asia in the centuries earlier, but also up to the present. I'm so excited to have you help us return there. Thank you.

TEREN SEVEA: Thank you. Thank you for having me here. So firstly, I just want to thank you, Diane, and everyone else for putting this together. Thank you, Mayra, for really inspiring us and starting us off. Thank you, Diane, Terry Tempest Williams, Matt, for being just wonderful.

I've been learning so much from all these conversations. It's really been-- it's left me with many questions. And one of the things that I think I really want to begin with, some of the things that came up from the papers that really struck me was, Mayra, your approach to really honoring stories, stories as a means to honor past possibilities for the future, really was something that was behind my own work on working through these animal stories, really thinking from there.

And I'm sorry, I'm going to be drawing from all the presentations here and bringing them together. One of the things that really struck me was how times of crisis were not just now in the present. I mean, this is not the only time of crisis. Of course, the scale of this is something else.

But really thinking of a long [INAUDIBLE] of times of crisis, if I could put it very crudely in that way. Thinking of how, in the past, for that matter, even for that matter, populations that were involved in the depletion of environments were, at times, forced to learn from Indigenous communities, care for more than human neighbors.

Really forced, and moments to learn, for that matter, right relationships with environments, relations with more-than-human neighbors, as Diane puts it off for us. Really, all the papers also, for me, were really pointing us towards acknowledging and appreciating and respecting and highlighting that it's the time of the hour for the-- it's the need of the hour to appreciate the personhood of animals, plants, the rains, groves, trees, and it goes on.

And really focusing our attention on questions of attention, relatedness, mutual relatedness across species, for that matter, reflecting on our very nature, reflecting on our sacred beings, sacred places, as the papers remind us. Now, this could be apocalyptic grief. This could be fearless grief.

And how do these reflections force us to acknowledge these processes of mourning, grieving? Remember, from the first paper down to the last, we were-- these presentations were speaking about this in multiple ways and really opening it up to acknowledge all kinds of things, including evolutionary promises, as Terry's paper pointed out.

What does this tell us about this? And my own paper-- and I have to admit that my paper was-- after listening to all these presentations, I felt my paper was very far behind from my those of my more learned colleagues, and I'm continuing to learn from them.

But my own paper was speaking in terms coming from this idea of honoring some of these stories, and these stories from Southeast Asia about animals and trees, and animals and trees being saints, being kin, being ancestors. Now, what was it that struck me in the fact that-- one of the things I said was that when I really was either looking at texts, manuscripts, even printed materials, or for that matter, sitting with communities, recording stories, often, I found that maybe it was my own initial hesitation years ago to appreciate these stories in their full content perhaps came from a lack of imagination rather than the lack of abundance of these stories, because these stories were abandoned.

And I think it's crucial, for that matter, to listen to these stories that were being shared amidst all kinds of processes, be it state centrism, be it colonial capitalism, be it post-colonial environmental destruction. Now, what was it-- I mean, how do these stories, stories on sacred tigers, sacred elephants, sacred crocodiles, they're being shared, transmitted amidst forest clearing, the loss of habitats, the forcible creation of plantations.

Now, the rise of temperatures, the rise of humidity in Southeast Asian cities, or for that matter, the very nature of cities sinking or land subsidence. I mean, the fact that these stories were so prominent at this moment themselves, for me, calls for us, as academic scholars of environments, to appreciate these much more.

And going back to-- I know Diane's call made for appreciating regeneration and rejuvenation was speaking in a different context, but one thing that struck me often about these stories was even if for the matter-- I was sharing some stories of sacred tigers. They were being encountered by humans and venerated and respected by humans at a moment of loss of habitats, for that matter.

Now, one thing that was striking here was that this devastating moment of the loss of habitats that was being mourned and being grieved, this moment was also being appreciated as a moment that drew sacred animals and humans into greater contact.

Now, there's so much that I felt that listening to these stories could teach me. I just want to leave with some of the questions that these stories brought to me, for that matter, was how listening to these stories forced us to, as I perhaps put in my abstract, reevaluate academic approaches to religion and environments.

Now, nowhere in this story was there-- stories, sorry, was there any special ontological position left for humans, for that matter. This was nowhere a world where humans were spiritualizing environments or nature. Now, these were multi-species worlds, and these multi-species worlds, multi-species families, multi-species religious communities, kind of really also forced us, I feel, to move away from an idea of the homogeneity of a human category also.

And I think this speaks a lot to our notions of the anthropocene that we have inherited and continue to perpetuate as Donna Haraway or Amitav Ghosh would remind us this. There's two more points. I think there was so much in these stories and some of the examples that I had learned about.

There were lessons in particular contexts, in very desegregated particular contexts, of lessons of protecting multi-species environments, multi-species ways of beings dealing with times of crisis, be they from increasing rainfall in Southeast Asian cities or, for that matter, mosquito-borne diseases that were also developing from these rise of humidity and temperatures in context.

Now, of course, paying-- as was highlighted earlier in the discussion, that paying attention to the particularity of trees or particularity of environments or landscapes or itself, for that matter, involves a deep transformation. And I think one of the great-- I feel very honored to be part of this group that's really speaking of this deep transformation and I hope that-- I'm looking forward to the rest of the conversation.

Sorry, my voice is a bit muffled. I've been sneezing away for some reason when it started.

DIANE MOORE: Thank you, Teren. And please, do not apologize for what you perceive to be your presentation, which all of us, I can speak with great authority, found incredibly animating and incredibly inspiring and informative. So stop it. Comments, questions on Teren's reflections? Anyone here?

MAYRA RIVERA: I mean, the first thing that I thought was that Dan is inviting me, inviting us to think in relation to ancestor and how those devotions impact the care for the non-human, as well. And I hear Teren also saying, well, the ancestors are not human only.

And so that seems like a very interesting way to think also about the ancestral practices that include the human and the non-human.

TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: Teren, you have to know that members of the Great Salt Lake Community Action Committee listened to your talk, and it gave us so much courage. It reminded me of William Stafford when someone said, when did you stop-- or when did you start writing poetry? And he said, when did you stop?

And I think because there's a real movement to provide and to honor selfhood, personhood with Great Salt lake, the first law, I think I mentioned it, that the Utah legislature put on the books, was that it was against the law for any river, mountain, animal, or being to have personhood. And so when we all watched yours together, it was like, this is not radical. It's what we've forgotten.

And so please know that through your presentation and how you animated these practices, you're reanimating a lot of despair that we're feeling with the Utah legislature, so it couldn't be more germane or more beautiful. So thank you.

MAYRA RIVERA: And I think in that sense of denying the person to the non-human, there's a colonial Christian dimension to that legacy, right? So it's a legacy that I feel especially compelled to challenge, precisely because of the ways in which it uprooted the sense of humans and kind of labeled as idolatry any sense of practice that would assume the personhood of a non-human. So I think it's one of those things to undo.

DAN MCKANAN: And I want to name that the conversation we're having right now is also a response to the question that Candace Laughinghouse has posted in the chat about whether indigenous views are at the center or the margin of this conversation, I think.

As Teren's presentation embodied so fully, they really are at the center when we're talking about acknowledging multi-species personhood. And there are other paths that are more intermittent about acknowledging that personhood that are becoming more and more part of the conversation. But the continuous ongoing thread is the relationality that indigenous communities have sustained with so many other persons for so many thousands of years.

DIANE MOORE: Thank you, Dan. I just wanted to add, too. Just to return back to, Mayra, your comment about the necessity to challenge our epistemic frames, like how do we think? And I'm just so struck by the starkness of your presentation, Teren, to say, what is just so common in a particular context, which is this multi-species understanding and identity. Just that that is the norm, that's the frame, and the powerful forces that have shaped a commentary that makes that frame be unthinkable, literally unthinkable.

And I'm both dismayed by that power. But also, again, back to your comment, Mayra, we can't reimagine until we realize the strictures within the structures that shape the ways we think. And so I'm just so relieved. I'm so liberated.

And I just-- I have to tell you, your opening story when you were talking about the pilgrimage to the baraka of the bathwater of the baby and how that was sacred. And then to learn that the baby-- the bathwater that the baby was in, the baby's a python. It was just a moment of just joy because, again, I, too, was in the human realm, right?

This is a baby. I'm thinking, baby, I'm thinking human baby. And you just check that right out of me and reminds me of the depth of these epistemic assumptions within me and the invitation to challenge them. So beautiful. And thank you.

TEREN SEVEA: If I could just follow up on that, Diane.

DIANE MOORE: Sure.

TEREN SEVEA: Since you raised that example, Diane, and going back to Mayra's point in terms of, is there a certain modern mindset, a colonial understanding of religion that has emerged? I mean, what's striking about that example you just raised, Diane, I perhaps mentioned this in the story, was that this moment when a python was being venerated as a saint, for the matter, the miracle worker, an Islamic miracle worker, you had, for that matter, a debate that will break out amongst Islamic scholars over whether that snake could be a saint or not.

And it's striking because you have this moment where emerging debates are happening in this 19th, 20th century moment, where on the other hand, you have communities that are holding on to this belief that this is Islamic, this is religion. And you have others starting to define that, really, this is superstition. This is idolatry. This is polytheism.

And it's clearly that legacy of that-- and what has been forgotten today amongst certain communities that, really, are holding on a kind of human-centered notion of religion is the fact that these debates even happened, let alone the fact that this was accepted. Yeah. So I think there's some unlearning there and going back. Yeah.

DIANE MOORE: Absolutely. Wonderful. And Candace, thank you. And thank you, Dan, for lifting up Candace's really critical and important question. All right. Well, thank you for this. And we'll turn now to you, Matt. Thank you again for your beautiful presentation that has stayed, I think, with all of us in terms of your interrogation of both grief and hope. So I turn it to you for your own synopsis and reflection.

MATTHEW ICHIHASHI POTTS: Thanks, Diane. And thanks, Reem, and Tammy, and Rachelle, and Natalie and everyone from the RPL and my co-panelists. I'm going to start with a moment from seven years ago. Terry, you mentioned seven years ago when you first came to New England because, in many ways, my comments from a few weeks ago and my comments tonight start from the class you and I taught together and a writing exercise that you had us all do together. I can't remember if I talked about this in our talk last time, but--

TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: You did, but repeat it. It's great. It's great.

MATTHEW ICHIHASHI POTTS: I want to restate it because it does mean so much, and it resonates with something that you said. And then I'll summarize my talk and then we'll end up to where I am now, quite literally, because I think where I am now links, in important ways, to Dan and Teren's talk.

So right, in that class that you and I taught together, Terry, the first thing you did-- I don't know if you remember this, but the first thing you had us do in the class is had us take out our journals, and you had us write for five minutes about a place we loved. And we all did that, and it was an exercise of attention and devotion in many ways.

And then you-- after the five minutes or seven minutes or whatever it was, you threw us the curve ball, which you said, now imagine that this place you love will not be there in five years, and you can't save it. What would you do? Write about what you would do.

And in a way that your talk did, in this kind of writing exercise, you asked us to move from this feeling of affection or admiration or devotion into an imagination of action. Like, what does this do? More than just feeling more than attention as a feeling, what does it give rise to in us as an act?

And that was a really important exercise for me. It's one I've used in other classes and that I bring up in talks like this, obviously, for the second time now. But it also-- I think it frames the way-- I'm grateful for it because it frames the way I wanted to think about what it was inviting us to think together about in my talk a couple of weeks ago, which is that I wanted to talk about grief and hope, in particular, not as feelings, not as effective states.

I think they are. They have effective dimensions, right? But I wanted to think about grief and hope, not as feelings, but as ethical postures, as ways to relate to the world. And if we think about grief and hope, not primarily as feelings or not only as feelings, but as postures towards that which we love, where does that lead us?

What does grief end up looking like? What does hope end up looking like? And maybe more importantly, to the point of your exercise, Terry, and at the point of your talk last week, what do we do with it? What action does that give rise to in us?

Yeah, and to do that, I looked at a couple of older Christian texts, one ancient, one medieval. I looked at the Gospel of Mark and the revelations of Julian of Norwich as apocalyptic texts, both in the ancient sense that Mayra pointed us to, the idea of these things as revelations. Julian talks about her vision as a revelation of divine love.

I think that the Gospel of Mark, and New Testament scholars will tell us, that it has a strong apocalyptic themes and has all the traits of ancient apocalyptic in it. And I wanted to look at those texts, in particular, as texts that are trying not to give rise to a feeling, but trying to form us towards an ethical posture, to form an ethical-- to situate us ethically towards the world.

One of the things I pointed to in Mark was the fact that in the earliest versions of the Gospel of mark, the resurrection appearance isn't an appearance, right? It's a kind of resurrection emptiness. There's the final line, the final-- the ending of the Gospel of Mark is the women going to the tomb and the tomb being empty, and them running away terrified.

And given the historical context of the composition of the Gospel of Mark, precisely in the wake of the collapse of-- more than the collapse, the destruction of Jerusalem, the utter violence and the colonial violence and imperial violence of Rome destroying tens of thousands of people, burning the city. That the context of this ending in emptiness is quite provocative, right?

That there isn't a happy ending given at the end of the story. On the contrary, the gospel is asking us not to reckon-- or rather, the gospel is asking us to reckon with the reality of loss. It's asking us, what do you do when you have loss before you? How do you relate?

And what we see, if we look back upon the gospel, is that Jesus, in the first half of the gospel, shows all these amazing deeds of power. And about halfway through the gospel, as he heads towards Jerusalem, he starts shedding all this power and turning all his attention towards care, towards love of all these people who are around him and who we know will probably be massacred in a few years after Jesus's death.

But he still shows them care and love in the present, and that's one of the ways I wanted to read the Gospel of Mark. What I pulled out of Julian were a couple of moments. There's this beautiful moment when-- it's a very gruesome text in some ways because Julian does not mince words when she talks about the suffering of Jesus in a way that's kind of consistent with lots of medieval texts.

But after she gives this long description of Jesus's suffering, she's giving this attention to his suffering and watching his body suffer and the bleeding and all these things. And she's looking at him, and she's talking about how horrible it is to look at him. And then she says she hears a voice speak to her and tell her that if she looks away from him, looks away from Jesus, and looks up to heaven, she will instantly be carried there. She'll be instantly carried to paradise.

All she has to do is look away from Jesus, look away from his suffering towards this other worldly paradise, and she will be carried there, right? And she's tempted by it for a moment. And then she says to the voice and says to Jesus, no, I will not look away because you are my heaven. You are the one I love.

And there's this interesting reciprocity because Jesus also says the same thing to her. She asks Jesus, what reward did God give you for suffering for me? And Jesus says to her, you were my reward. There's no other thing. You are the thing. There's no-- you are not an instrument by which I arrive at some salvation, rather, the love is the good in and of itself.

And it's from these two texts that I wanted to talk about something like grief and hope and what they mean to us and what ethical posture they should give rise to in us and for us with respect to grief. And I leaned into Judith Butler a little bit to think about this. What Butler says is that we can tell what we love by that which we grieve losing or that which we fear we will grieve losing, right?

And that means that the recognition of love is also a recognition of precarity and vulnerability. Those things which are precarious, which suffer under precarity, which are vulnerable, those are the things that are worth protecting and caring for and loving, right? And I think this is really important, I think, with respect to the Christian tradition, because Christianity, in so many of its traditional forms, themes to be about developing a strategy by which we attain invulnerability, by which we overcome precarity and arrive at a place of utter security and absolute invulnerability.

And insofar as Christianity generates this myth of invulnerability as the thing that we arrive at, the invulnerable thing doesn't need our care. The thing that suffers no precarity doesn't need us to take care of it. And so when we look at the world, we look at others, we look at ourselves as creatures who, if we do the right thing, if we have the right kind of faith, arrive at some kind of invulnerability, that actually turns us away from love.

It turns us away from acknowledging precarity, rather than turning us towards it, which is what I see something like a character like Jesus in the Gospel of Mark doing, turning away from the kind of utter invulnerability towards practices of care for others around them. So grief becomes this way of recognizing vulnerability and precarity and spurring us towards care rather than turning away from precarity and creating the illusion or the myth that we can somehow become invulnerable.

With respect to hope, I think what this means is that hope, for me, I think, becomes less a category of knowledge about what the future will hold or about what outcome will arise and more a category of love, right? That we do something, we care for something, not because we can guarantee its outcome, a good final outcome. When we think about hope, it's like, well, things will end well. We hope that it will end well.

What hope really is, I think, or a different version of hope would be one where we look at-- we care for the object, whether or not we know we can save it, but because it in itself deserves our care. And I think this is really important with respect to climate change, because, as you said, you took this line from mine, dying early in the talk. It sort of confounds the logic of extractive capitalism, a logic where we look at the Earth as a tool that we must use to provide our own security and invulnerability.

It means the Earth becomes, or the natural world, or other human beings become the instruments by which we make ourselves safe, by which we get ourselves the invulnerability that we think that our religion and our God has promised us, rather than turning towards the Earth as a thing to be cared for in and of itself, right? And this is important because many theologians have been talking about this.

Francis speaks about this in a similar way in Laudato Si. And Rowan Williams has an essay on what it means to relate to the earth, not as something to be used by us, but as a co-creation, as-- I mean, in a way that echo what Teren and Terry and Dan and Mayra, too, have also been talking about.

And this really is interesting because I was just reading an article the other day about-- or yesterday about environmental-- different technological solutions to climate change, where we provide shade over the whole Earth to cool things down, right? Again, I don't know the science about this. I'm not trying to pretend to be a scientist, but this is this kind of epistemic shift, where we need to turn away from thinking of the Earth as an instrument to be manipulated by us so that we can preserve our own security and turn instead towards thinking about the Earth as co-creation, in Christian terms maybe, or as kin, as ancestor, which points more towards the talks that Dan and Teren offered.

I said I'd end where I am. Literally, I'm zooming with you all from Tokyo, and it's tomorrow in Tokyo, and Tuesday morning is great. You should look forward to it. But I'm here-- at risk of being a little bit personal, I'm here-- your talks have been really important to me because it's a little bit of a journey of personal grief for me.

And I've been thinking about to Mayra's point about the relationship between little local stories of love and larger patterns of apocalypse and how these things relate to each other. My mom, who's Japanese, died in 2022, and this trip was a trip to take my dad here to Japan to see her family and to visit the family grave. In Japan, graves, as families, are collective.

And I've been thinking so much about, Dan, your talk about the way that we decide to memorialize ancestors and how different that is here and also how linked it is to the way that the natural world is revered in Japan. Tokyo is the biggest econ urbanization in the world, but even here, you will be down a side street, and you'll see a tree that has-- it's revered as a god, just on the side of the road.

I was in Osaka, where my mom was from, the other day, and there's a tiny temple in the middle of the busiest part of Osaka, a city of 16 million people. There's a tiny temple, a Buddhist temple, with a statue of Fudo Myo, who's a Buddhist kind of god of violence. He's got a sword, and he comes and he eradicates ignorance and vice.

But in this place, moss is completely overgrown Fudo Myo, and nature has come back and covered this. And it's one of the most revered-- you see tourists and Japanese people there all the time coming to see this angry God who's covered over with moss and looks quite gentle because all the features have been softened by the greenery.

I've just been thinking so much about how we think about kin, how we think about ancestors, how the manner of our remembrance and memorialization and grief ties so much to who we think of as our kin and how we think of our relationships to one another. Yeah. And so this has been a really wonderful conversation for me, and both in a larger sense, but also in a more personal sense as I've made this journey in pilgrimage over spring break.

Just a couple of final comments before I close. One of the things that you said in your comments tonight, Mayra, was about the forms of writing that can link individual stories to these larger narratives, these apocalyptic narratives. One of the things that my talk did not indicate is that this is part of a book project for of mine. And most of the book project is actually less focused on Julian and Mark and more focused on this trend in contemporary fiction, especially, of dystopian and post-apocalyptic novels or apocalyptic novels.

And those are places where I think those connections are really interesting. So one of the books I'm looking at is-- this is not post-apocalyptic, but it's apocalyptic, is the novel Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward, which is about Katrina. And there, I think you can see-- I think the novel form gives us a way to look at an individual family, individuals and their individual griefs and mourning, in a way that also links it to larger structures and systemic issues.

And another flood novel is the book A Children's Bible by Lydia Millet, which, again, at the heart of this book is an individual grief and individual acts, practices, and experiences of mourning. But they're also linked to these larger patterns.

And then just the last thing. I know I make a lot of hay about Mark ending and emptiness, the Gospel of Mark ending in emptiness and the terror and everything. But there are additional endings to the Gospel of Mark. And the way the original ending of Mark goes is that the women said nothing to anyone, for they were terrified.

But we know they said something to someone because we're all here. And that gets me to thinking about Dan's comment about, what about reflourishing? What about restoration? What about new life? What about this?

And I think that was really useful, Dan, that comment, that question because I think the grief that somebody like Butler is talking about and that I think I want to invoke is less about the retroactive grief of a thing that's already died or can't be saved. It's more the recognition of a thing which is vulnerable. You know what I mean? It's also anticipatory grief. This thing might not survive unless I-- and so there's, even my act of care is always kind of haunted by a little edge of grief because I know that the thing I love is vulnerable.

And that's what turns me towards it, even if it is flourishing. Even if it is finding new life. So thank you.

DIANE MOORE: Beautiful. Thank you. Thank you, Matt. Comments, anyone? Responses?

TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: You know, Matt, you restored my faith in what hope could be because coming out of a Mormon culture, hope just seemed like an excuse to turn away. It will be fine. I have all the hope in the world.

And I was always accused of being such a downer. And I just wanted someone to say, there is something deeper than hope. And when you offered that to us-- years ago, when we first met, we met over grief. Then I thought, now that makes sense to me that just as you say that grief and hope, not as feelings, but ethical postures that then become actions.

So I just want to thank you for that. And I just want to also acknowledge I'm so sorry about your mother's passing and what a powerful pilgrimage you're on.

- Anyone else? I'll just jump in quickly. Another kind of gob smacked me relevant to your talk, which was fascinating from start to finish, was just the way that you represented the incredible power and importance of grief just in your example of your pastoral care practices and what happens when people receive devastating news about loss of loved one or the illness of a loved one.

And what do we do? We don't turn away. We don't say, I'm going to hope that this isn't true. Or we might. We might have these moments of denial or whatever. And just what is-- the power of what it means to sit with loss, which you just experienced, talking about your mom.

I think we all have those experiences and just how powerful they are because the horror of what would happen if we did not grieve. What would that mean about us? So I just want to thank you for that and for all of the ways that you put together the Christian heritage that I also struggle with from my own background, but to infuse new life into it. So thank you. Thank you for that.

Any other comments before we turn to Terry? OK, I want to just introduce a comment for you, Terry. It's one of the things that I remember hearing it when you first presented two weeks ago and then in re-listening this weekend to your talk. I just want to challenge you in your initial comments when you said, my talk is not academic, it's personal.

And I just want to say I want to challenge that dichotomy, that binary, because that's the binary that we need to undo. That the power of the creative of the personal is the motivating factor. It is richly quote, "Academic" in its depth and its power and its importance. So with that caveat, thank you for your presentation two weeks ago and for your comments and presence here tonight.

TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: With that comment, you just slayed me. I just-- really, Diane, that stopped me. We just got back from a pilgrimage, 16 students that Stephanie and I had worked with for a year. And so I feel like I'm salt encrusted. My lips are chapped and bleeding. I'm windblown, and my mind is still at the lake.

So if that's what the Academy is, then I hope I'm in it forever because I really witnessed-- Mayra, when you talk about what is-- that we must be transformed. I saw all of us transformed in ways we couldn't have imagined. I think we tried to prepare ourselves for grief of a dying lake.

But what we encountered was absolute joy in her presence. And the only time that we encountered grief, and I will speak for myself, was when we entered into religion. And that was at our dean, her wisdom, when she looked at the syllabus, which I was so thrilled about because it was going to the bird refuge, going to the lake, walking the spiral jetty, lying inside the sun tunnels, talking about Brine shrimp, Brine flies.

I just thought we really got it here. And she asked me the most stunning question. She said, are you going to Temple Square? Which is, the Vatican for Mormons. And I said, no. And she said, why not? This is a divinity school.

And I said-- what came out of my mouth was, because it's a place of pain. And she sat with that for a minute, and she said, what's the relevancy of the Mormon church to Great Salt Lake? And I gave a litany that went on 20 minutes.

Because one sentence across the pulpit would change the entire behavior of the state of Utah. Because all the economics of water rights and land rights are in the hands of the Mormon church. Because-- because, because, because, because. And then she said, you might want to go there. And I said, now I know why you're dean.

We went there. And I think what I noticed in the posture of the students, and I hadn't planned on sharing this, but it's to our point, I think, is the structures of violence and of unequal distribution of power and money. And when we got to the second floor of the new LDS convention center that has usurped the cultural tabernacle, where it can seat 12,000 without a nail through pioneer engineering to what locally is known as the mega nickel that seats 33,000 people, when we went to the second floor, there was a wall of portraits, and they were all white men over 70.

And we realized, both unspoken and spoken, that everything we had talked about, every place we had gone, no matter the transformation that had occurred and the kind of hope that is being transformed into postures of care is completely dependent on the decision of those male leaders. And, Diane, it made me think about what you've given us, which we're really going back to, what is the role of religion in times of Earth crisis?

And boy, did we ever stare it right in the face? And so I want to put that out there as something that we really do have to reckon with along this path of transformation, because in a state like Utah, and we're seeing it in the United states, religion is playing an outsized role even in this Earth crisis in terms of the decisions that we're being able to make on the ground.

So I do want to say that. I also wanted to say the gratitude I feel, Diane, for you bringing us together. I needed this. And I have looked forward and taken-- I have two journals of notes that I've taken on this, and I'm so grateful to Reem, and to Rachelle, and Judy, and Kristen and everyone that has put this together.

I also want to say to each of you, to Mayra, to Dan, to Teren, and to Matt, how much you have influenced my way of being in the world. And it's been a privilege to share in these conversations. What I wanted to lay forward in my part was this idea of wild mercy.

That if Grace is something God grants us unearned, undeserved, freely given, then can mercy be what we can offer to Earth and all her beings, their beings with whom we share this planet? That it's not only about saving humans, but all of our living beings in times of this crisis that we've been all talking about with kinship and care.

I spoke about how important it is to find how we can put our love into action, and as Matt has shown us again and again, that grief and love are siblings. One of the things, though, that I've been thinking about since the talk is, what does it mean when the Earth loves us back?

What does it-- we've been talking about, how do we love the Earth? How do we have a reciprocal relationship with Earth? What are those moments when Earth responds, and how do we view that? And being out at great Salt Lake, there were two examples that were so powerful.

One, we met with the deputy czar of the Commission on climate change, appointed by the governor. And we were asking him about the endangered species because we're about to petition the US Fish and Wildlife Service to list the Wilson's phalarope as an endangered species. They rely 100% on the brine flies of great Salt Lake.

And he said, well, that's a good idea, but what evidence do we have that the endangered species will make a difference and not slow down the process? And just then, the ground just started rumbling and trembling. And we turned, and there were hundreds of bison stampeding right above us.

And we all just stood, instinctively just stood, and for five minutes, watched what once was from horizon to horizon gone because of violent structures of colonialism. Almost on cue, answered the deputy's question, and even he had to acknowledge that maybe the bison had been listening.

And it was just one of those beautiful moments where you think, there is this synchronicity that occurs. That when this energy is put forward to the Earth, the Earth itself responds. There was another moment, our last night, where we were meeting with frontline communities, communities of color, young people, fierce, saying, we're the communities that are going to bear the brunt of these toxic winds of arsenic.

And they were asking our HDS students, who I witnessed as spiritual care, what do we do? Where is our protection? How do we find solidarity? What is hope? And what do we do with our grief? All of these questions that have been brought together.

And I watched our students really not only listen, but guide in the most beautiful ways. And one of our students, who many of you know, Auds, said, may I offer a chance that we could sing together to just remember that there is something deeper than hope and that we can find solidarity beyond words in song and chant and presence?

And as she directed this chant that she had been given from great Salt Lake when she was out at the Sun Tunnels, with 85-mile-per-hour winds, there was this deep resonance. I've never heard a deep chord like that in wind. And in that song that was whistling through the tunnels came up with this chant.

Please, believe me when I tell you that one-third, maybe 1/3 of the way into the chant, coyotes started singing with her. And we all just-- all of the grief we had been holding, there was so much joy. Everyone sat up. We sang louder, chanting.

The coyotes came closer, and they sang for probably 10, 15 minutes with us. And I just have to believe that this is an animated world, that we are kin. And that if we can extend our vulnerability to each other, then the vulnerability of the Earth meets us, and in that, there is singing.

In that, there is a chant. In that, there is this heart beating, stampeding energy that takes us to a place we may not even be able to imagine. And to me, that's the transformative gesture portal practice of love.

DIANE MOORE: Beautiful. Beautiful. Thank you. Thank you for those images and the-- you brought us there, presence. You brought us to the tabernacle, and you brought us to this miraculous interspecies powerful connection. Thank you. Comments, questions from our panelists?

I want to say to all of you, thank you, again, for bringing us both into your provocative, powerful commentaries from your presentations, but also the kind of extension of what you're thinking relevant to the conversations we've been now having virtually, but now together.

One of the things I'm coming away from this series with is this incredible renewal of belief in the power of individual agency in the sense that our actions matter. They matter tremendously, everything from the small gestures of our lives to the large commitments we make, because we are parts of communities acknowledged and unacknowledged. And our actions impact those communities of humans and the greater-than-human world, for good and ill.

And my training is as a social ethicist, so I've been so inspired by the language of what it means to name and uncover the structures that confine us. And all of you have done so powerfully. But the other thing I have to say I'm so grateful for is the incredible force of the stories you've shared that are often unacknowledged in our larger kind of public conversation or discourse.

And what's happened to me in this series is I have shifted, not entirely because we can't shift entirely, but rather than feel like, what are the strategies to convince others of the importance of local stories, of the intimate gesture, of the commitments, of the understanding of our profound interdependency? I can't say I'm abandoning that, but what I feel animated by is to just live it. To live it. To speak it.

To try to and invoke my own commitments to that and the depth of my understanding of that by thinking of spaces and places that I love, of species that I feel so drawn to for ways that are surprising to me, and to just pay attention to that energy of my commitment to relationality with species that I don't really know or understand, but I'm drawn to profoundly.

And there's something about, then, the shift of the epistemic shift that I have been inspired to make further, I'll say, from all of you to be the change I-- to use a cliche phrase, to be the change I hope to see in the world. And I just want to say thank you for that because these structures are so powerful and can be so-- and are so destructive and so disheartening.

But they eclipse when you think of the power of the intimacies that we all haven't shared. And to be able to speak about them as eloquently as you all have has inspired me to try to do the same.

So I want to thank you for that. It's powerful. It's profound. And it's more than I'd hoped for in the initial conversations and conceptions when, Mayra, you and I talked about the possibility of this series, gosh, months and months ago. So I'll just say thank you and maybe turn to you, Mayra, maybe for closing comments.

MAYRA RIVERA: Wow there's so much in these conversations. I just am full of gratitude. And encouragement, too. I mean, I think that Dan encouraged us to think about the spaces that are re-flourishing. And in some ways, there's also in tandem to that, both the sense of the word collectivities happen. That do things differently that exceed or go beyond the calculus of returns, and even where religion happens.

I think in Terry's story, you have the big spaces, but you also have religion happening in that space with the students. And so I hope that-- this has also inspired me to seek out ways to continue these conversations in which we learn from very different places and stories and histories and challenges, but also of power and possibility.

DIANE MOORE: Well, thank you. And thank you again, Mayra, for inspiring all of us with your presidential talk. I remember getting chills reading it because I wasn't able to be in attendance, but when it was finally available, I just remember feeling like, this is a transformational moment.

And your willingness to continue this conversation and invite us all and to be part of it has been a real gift, I know, for all of us. So thank you. Thank you for that and for your ongoing work.

And thank you, again, all of my friends and colleagues in the room. Again, learning from you is one of the great privileges of my life, and I'm incredibly grateful to be in these conversations with you all. And thank you to our audience. Several of you have been with us, we know, through the whole series, and so grateful for your time and attention to these important questions and for the questions you posed throughout, which really helped animate our conversations each week and continue to do so here.

And there was a question in the chat about the availability of these talks. They can be found on the religion and public life website. If you Google religion and public life at Harvard Divinity School, you'll see our website, and we will be featuring these talks prominently as they become available.

So once again, this is the close of our six-part series. Grateful, always, to our colleagues who help make this happen behind the scenes. Again, Rachelle, Tammy, and Reem, especially, who are showing up every Monday night to make sure that we are doing well. And I just celebrate you and so grateful to you.

So, again, thank you all. I hope these conversations continue in our small ways and in our large ways. These questions are urgent. They are timely. They are present. And our individual agency matters tremendously. Thank you all.

SPEAKER 3: Sponsors, Religion and Public Life at Harvard Divinity School, The Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability at Harvard University, The Center for the Study of World Religions, The Constellation Project, and HarvardX.