Event Highlight: Religion in Times of Earth Crisis Series

What can an expansive understanding of religion provide in these times of earth crisis? Members of the Harvard Divinity School faculty set out to tackle this pressing question in the second series of public conversations developed by RPL.  

Mayra Rivera, HDS Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Religion and Latinx Studies, in collaboration with Diane L. Moore, associate dean of Religion and Public Life, structured these conversations around Rivera’s American Academy of Religion 2022 Presidential Address, “What is the Role of the Study of Religion in Times of Catastrophe?” 

Each featured faculty member spoke from their individual areas of expertise, weaving together  many worlds—local, historical, theological, spiritual, and cultural. Throughout the series, presenters asked the audience to turn both inward and toward their communities, asking: what would it mean for each of us to open ourselves to the challenging, paradigm-shifting calls to action offered by these presenters? 

Religion in Times of Earth Crisis Series Overview 

"A Procession of Catastrophes" with Mayra Rivera, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Religion and Latinx Studies

Environmental catastrophes can create a break in the experience of time, they can rupture the possibility of collective meaning. Yet for communities shaped by colonialism and racism, this rupture can only be understood in relation to the past, as an event in the “unceremoniously archived procession of our catastrophes,” to use Édouard Glissant’s words. Histories of colonial and racial devastation teach us that environmental futures are linked to our pasts. We may describe them as “ancestral catastrophes,” as Elizabeth Povinelly suggests. In this session, Mayra Rivera explores the question, “How may we engage those stories in ways that honor our pasts and open possibilities for different futures?” 

Key Quote from Rivera:

“Theological imagery may remind us of the generative power of retelling old, tattered stories in new contexts, allowing us to see differently. Looking through the rubble of ancient metaphors and relics, we can reactivate the power of religious symbols to speak to crises that our everyday languages seem barely able to reach. Like icons, theological images and stories can turn us toward the unnamable.”

Concluding Quote:

Mayra Rivera, has found this connection between love and grief in apocalyptic genres that act as revelation, which, she says, “can be attentive to the weight of the present and express lament at what we have already lost, at all we cannot save—acknowledging them in their precious particularity—inviting us to acts of care beyond the usual calculus of returns.” 

"Ancestors and Climate in Our Boston Backyard" with Dan McKanan, Ralph Waldo Emerson Unitarian Universalist Association Senior Lecturer in Divinity 

Two hundred years ago, the residents of metropolitan Boston faced a climate crisis. White settlers had destroyed the region’s pine forests, triggering dangerous disruptions to both water and carbon cycles. Activists responded by creating forest parks on previously disrupted landscapes. But many of these activists were themselves descended from the settlers who had caused the harm they sought to heal. In imperfect yet instructive ways, they blended ecological care with new forms of ancestral devotion. Gradually they learned what indigenous communities had long known: that care for the more-than-human-world is inseparable from care for our ancestors. In this session, Dan McKanan, will discuss these stories and how they can help contemporary Bostonians, and others, recognize that what makes a place wild is not the absence of humans but the presence of ancestors. 

Key Quote from McKanan:

"I’ve 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, including not only human kin but all the creatures of multiple species with whom we are human kin, we're 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.”

Concluding Quote:

“Rethinking the conservation tradition includes not only efforts to preserve and protect special unusual places, but also to preserve and protect the ordinary places where we live, work and play. We must 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.”

"Animal Stories, in Crisis" with Teren Sevea, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies

Across the Indian Ocean world, communities have shared stories while encountering legacies of modern state-centrism, colonial capitalism, post-colonial environmental destruction and religious reform. Muslim communities, among others, have shared stories of religious environments and animals that were inherited, transmitted, and reinterpreted in light of evolving ecological crises. These stories of multispecies ancestors and colonizers, Islamic conceptions of the environment, and narrative traditions of Islamic ecological care have confronted cycles of crises with visions of pasts and futures. In this session, Teren Sevea will discuss the question, “Can listening to these stories compel us to re-evaluate our academic approaches to religion and environments and the relationship of religious pasts and presents, in our time of crisis?” 

Key Quote from Sevea:

“I hope I did justice to these stories by conveying that animals possessed, personhood, individuality, souls. They possessed intentionality. They possessed genealogies, ancestries, and also languages, and even voices in participating in communications with humans. . . . Amitav Gosh argues from European colonial projects of assuming that it's primitive communities that believe in the vital spirits of animals, landscapes, environments, etc. This points out a philosophical premise that underlies many academic disciplines at times. . . . He says that the thing is to recognize that non-humans can, do, and must speak.”

Concluding Quote:

He says, “All the presentations were challenging, pointing us towards acknowledging and appreciating and respecting the Earth and its inhabitants. They highlighted that it is the time and the hour for the “how.” It is the need of the hour to appreciate the personhood of animals, plants, terrains, groves, trees. And we must focus on questions of attention, relatedness, mutual relatedness across species, for that matter. This will require reflecting on our very nature, reflecting on our sacred beings and sacred places. I remember from the first presentation down to the last, we spoke about this in multiple ways and really opened the conversation to acknowledge all kinds of things.” 

"Apocalyptic Grief: Reckoning with Loss, Wrestling with Hope" with Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church

Human-caused climate change already contributes to manifold global disasters. As the planet inevitably continues to warm, these disasters will be routine and unrelenting. Addressing the reality of loss must become a basic spiritual task of our climate present and future, along with summoning the resolve to respond to all our losses. In this session, Matthew Ichihashi Potts will consider the apocalyptic roots of the Christian tradition in order both to diagnose how Christianity has contributed to the present crisis, as well as to suggest possibilities for a different way forward. Through particular attention to grief and hope as religious categories, and with specific reference to various moments and movements from within the Christian tradition, Potts will reflect upon the spiritual crisis at the heart of climate catastrophe and suggest the potential for a religious response.

Key Quote from Potts:

“We love that what that which we would grieve losing, and we grieve that which we love. It's only by acknowledging grief, that which we might lose, that we progress to a real, fulsome love. And if hope is a form of love, then hope is a way that we can have a relationship to what's going to happen in the future. Hope can acknowledge loss or destruction to be unavoidable, which is where it differs from some currents of optimism. Yet, hope refuses to capitulate. Hope is not the conviction that things will turn out well, but the certainty that what we are doing has meaning, whatever the outcome, because what we are working toward is good.

If we think about the earth, not as something to be used but as something to be cared for regardless of the outcome, whether or not we can save it, whether or not it's going to make our lives easier or longer, then we come into a different relationship with this Earth. We will have a relationship of love that inspires us to act on the Earth’s behalf because it exists and is good rather than what it can do for us. It's worth loving the world as it is because it is good, because God told us it's good, not because we are guaranteed to save it, not because if we save it, it will save us, but because it deserves to be loved.” 

Concluding Quote:

“I want to think about grief and hope, not as feelings, but as ethical postures, as ways we relate to the world. If we think about grief and hope, not only as feelings but as postures towards that which we love, where does that lead us?”

"The Practice of Wild Mercy: Something Deeper Than Hope" with Terry Tempest Williams, HDS Writer-in-Residence

Can personhood be granted to mountains, lakes, and rivers? What does it mean to be met by another species? How do we extend our notion of power to include all life forms? And what does a different kind of power look like and feel like? Wild Mercy is in our hands. Practices of attention in the field with compassion and grace deepen our kinship with life, allowing us to touch something deeper than hope. Great Salt Lake offers us a reflection into our own nature: Are we shrinking or expanding?

Key Quote from Williams:

“The eyes of the future are looking back at us and praying that we might see beyond our time. They are kneeling with hands clasped, that we might act with restraint, that we might leave room for the life that is destined to come. To protect what is wild is to protect what is gentle. Perhaps the wildness we fear is the pause between our own heartbeats, the silent space that says, we live only by grace. Wildness lives by this same grace. Wild mercy is in our hands. . . . We are one family. I hope that together, each in our own communities around the world, we can find holy resistance, that we can make waves, that we will not remain silent. that we will find the courage of a sustained focus on behalf of our Earth community. It is time. Wild mercy is in our hands.” 

Concluding Quote:

“What is it we've been talking about?” Terry Tempest Williams asks, calling us to leave changed. “What does it mean when the earth loves us back?  How do we love the earth? How do we have a reciprocal relationship with Earth?” She concludes, “I just have to believe that his is an animated world with which we are kin. If we can extend our vulnerability to each other, then the vulnerability of the Earth meets us. In that meeting there is singing, there is a chance, there is this beating heart, stampeding energy that takes us to a place we may not even be able to imagine. To me that's the transformative gesture, a portal practice of love.”

"Reflecting on Religion in Times of Earth Crisis" with participating faculty members and moderator Diane L. Moore

The concluding session features host, Diane L. Moore, and all the participating faculty reflecting upon the insights shared throughout the series. In addition to identifying themes and throughlines among sessions, we will return 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? 

Key Quote from Diane L. Moore, Associate Dean of Religion and Public Life:

“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.” 

Concluding Quote:

In the final session, “Reflecting on Religion in Times of Earth Crisis,” Diane L. Moore pointed out a throughline in the faculty presentations, saying, “All of our presenters evoked specific places, beings, and intimacies that animate them, and that in turn animates their work. All of our presenters provided examples of care and focus that—in Matt's beautiful words—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.”

Watch the recorded discussions and read the transcripts here.