Conversation with J. Kameron Carter
Ukraine Perspectivein War, Religion & International Law Catastrophe&ReligionBlackClimate
MAGAZINE OF THE CENTER OF THEOLOGICAL INQUIRY
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ISSUE 8 SPRING 2022 We convene leading thinkers in an interdisciplinary environment where theology makes an impact on global concerns, and we share our research to inform public thinking. OUR MISSION OUR PROGRAM Religion and the Natural Environment 2 An Image for our Times From the Director William Storrar reflects on the hopeful mission of CTI during a time of global conflict and ecological crisis. 4 Ukraine in Perspective War, Religion & International Law CTI Members Mary Ellen O’Connell and John Burgess discuss the theological and legal issues at stake in the war in Ukraine. 8 Black Religion & Climate Catastrophe A conversation with J. Kameron Carter and Peter Paris on black studies and ecology, moderated by William Storrar. 14
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and CTI Member Friederike Nüssel reflects with Joshua Mauldin on the interdisciplinary and ecumenical task of theology in the contemporary university and in society. 41 Why ICTISupport Judith McCartin Scheide 40 William H. Scheide Lecture on Religion & Global Concerns SPRING 2022 fresh THINKING 1 CONTENTS DIRECTOR William Storrar ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR Joshua Mauldin DIRECTOR OF PHILANTHROPY Karin Morse ADMINISTRATION Jade Talag DESIGNER Debra Trisler CONTRIBUTORS William Barbieri John Burgess J. Kameron Carter Mark AndyFrederickLisaPeterJudithElainePeterWolfgangFriederikeMaryKananJan-OlavDouglasHenriksenKitaniEllenO’ConnellNüsselPalaverParisRutherfordMcCartinScheideScottSiderisSimmonsWightman ACADEMIC ADVISORY PANEL John Bowlin Peter LeslieJeremySusanEstherPeterPeterFriederikeIanNicoCathleenJenniferJan-OlavTammyAgustínDavidFrancisCasarellaClooneyFergussonFuentesGaberHenriksenHerdtKavenyKoopmanMcFarlandNüsselOchsParisReedSchneiderWaldronWingard BOARD OF TRUSTEES Roy Lennox, Chair Gayle Robinson, Vice Chair Jon Pott, Secretary Robert Wedeking, Treasurer Fred CharlesJayWilliamJudithDouglasCarterRobertBrianBetteDarrellAndersonArmstrongJane(B.J.)BoothFixGunnKarinsLeonardMcCartinScheideStorrarVawterWall HONORARY TRUSTEES Craig Barnes Robin KristaRichardLovinMouwTippett EMERITUS/EMERITA TRUSTEES Robert Hendrickson Judy RalphWornatWyman ON THE COVER: THE APOCALYPSE, THE FOUR HORSEMEN 15 TH CENTURY WOODCUT BY ALBRECHT D U RER, WITH PERMISSION FROM METROPOLITAN MUSEUM. THIS PAGE, CHOKNITI/ADOBESTOCK 38 Spring Books from our CTI Members advancedShowcasingresearch
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Members from workshop on Religion the Natural Environment on research theme from their own various scholarly perspectives policy,
Dürer’s horsemen turn out to be an apt if haunting image for CTI’s current In quiry on Religion and Global Issues. Long before the pandemic, COP 26, or war in Ukraine, we set out to convene scholars of religion around five global concerns: migration, violence, economic inequality, and the future of the built and natural environment. We have been sharing their research in progress on these themes since the launch of Fresh Thinking in 2018. This latest edition of the magazine is no exception. It brings fine essays on religion and the natural environment from the members of our current research workshop, making climate connections with all these global issues.
Sadly, Dürer’s woodcut remains an image for our times, as his horsemen thunder through the following pages. Happily, you will also find informed perspectives to make sense of the riders’ “motion and danger in this climactic moment.” CTI’s scholars continue to give us reasons for hope.
— FROM THE DIRECTOR —
As the first news of the invasion of Ukraine seized the world’s attention, I was able to turn to John Burgess and Mary Ellen O’Connell, two senior CTI scholars with expert knowledge respectively of the role of the Orthodox Church in that region and international law on the use of force. Their CTI webinar on Ukraine in Per spective drew a concerned and appreciative audience from around the world. We are pleased to publish their insights on the conflict for our readers.
The third and most famous woodcut from Dürer’s series of illustrations for The Apocalypse, the Four Horsemen presents a dramatically distilled version of the passage from the Book of Revelation (6:1–8) ... Transform ing what was a relatively staid and unthreatening image in earlier illustrat ed Bibles, Dürer injects motion and danger into this climactic moment through his subtle manipulation of the woodcut. The parallel lines across the image establish a basic middle tone against which the artist silhouettes and overlaps the powerful forms of the four horses and riders—from left to right, Death, Famine, War, and Plague (or Pestilence).
—William Storrar, Director
As a policymaker in our research workshop on the natural environment asked in a recent seminar, what can theology do to motivate people to take climate change seriously and implement long-term solutions now? One answer was given by our distinguished William H. Scheide Lecturer on Religion and Global Concerns, J. Kameron Carter. In CTI’s first public event since 2020, Professor Carter spoke on the resources of Black religion to avert climate catastrophe. You can read about his Black Studies perspective on the ecological crisis in our recorded conversation with him.
But why put Dürer’s image on the front cover of our magazine? CTI is a research center, not a policy thinktank or an advocacy group on current affairs. What CTI can offer the concerned public are informed commentaries by research scholars that put these current events into broader perspective, beyond the rush and rumor of the latest harrowing news reports. This edition offers you a range of insightful articles on the global issues of our time. Let me highlight two of them.
An Image for our Times
Albrecht Dürer’s late 15th century woodcut of the Four Horsemen of the Apoc alypse is an appropriate if disturbing image for the cover of Fresh Thinking, giv en this edition’s lead articles on war and climate catastrophe. We can reproduce Dürer’s famous image thanks to the public-spirited policy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Here is how the Met describes it:
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Death, famine, war, and plague or pestilence, these four horsemen continue to ride over the Earth, as they did in the Biblical imagination and in Dürer’s day. The Covid pandemic has shown our global vulnerability to pestilence. Civilians are still targeted for killings in war. We see this evil in Ukraine but do not forget the victims of war and famine around the globe who no longer make the head lines. Religious texts and works of art like Dürer’s woodcut have a more enduring capacity to hold our moral attention. Its arresting image of a blighted humanity under the thundering hooves of these four riders is now joined by a fifth horse man, climate catastrophe.
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John Burgess with graduate students at St Tikhon’s Orthodox University in Moscow
For Ukrainians, Russia has failed to acknowledge that Ukrainians are a distinctive people. They resent Russia’s effort to use Orthodox religious values to support imperialistic claims. Moreover, turning to the West and its liberal democratic values has helped Ukrainians defend their distinctive national identity, which includes a tolerance, far greater than in Rus sia, of religious pluralism; Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Protestant evangelicals, Orthodox, and others have worked together productively in Ukraine.
John Burgess with pilgrims and monks in a village along Russia’s Volga River
ussia’s invasion of Ukraine has hit me hard personally. I have spent nearly twenty years getting to know this part of the world; I have friends and acquaintances in both countries and especially in Russia, where I have had three year-long sabbaticals. My research has focused on the rebirth of Orthodox Christianity after seven ty-five years of Soviet communism. Now, to my dismay, religion has helped fuel the conflict be tween these two nations.
This religious history has implications for politics. For Russians and President Putin, Ukrainians and Russians have been one people and have shared one Orthodox culture for more than a millennium. They resent Ukraine’s drift toward the West and its liberal democratic and moral values.
A religious dimension to the conflict is also evident in how Russians and Ukrainians tell their national stories. In 988 AD, the prince of Rus’, Vladimir, ac cepted baptism into Orthodox Christianity in what is now Crimea. When he returned to Kyiv, he had his warriors and their families baptized en masse in the Dnieper River, which flows through the city. From that moment on, Orthodoxy embedded itself in the
JOHN BURGESS
Indeed, it is said that Vladimir converted to Ortho doxy because of its worship. The Orthodox liturgy invites one into a foretaste of heaven. One revels in the divine light that illumines all that exists, and experiences the world as transfigured by divine beauty, just as Jesus was once transfigured before his apostles. The Eastern Slavs have understood themselves to have a special responsibility to guard this vision of a rightly ordered world at peace. They have called it, “Holy Rus’.”
Today, there are two ways of telling the story of Holy Rus’. In the Russian version, Kyiv declined in signif icance over the centuries, and Holy Rus’ found its center in Moscow. In the other version, Ukrainians remained true to Holy Rus’, even when they suffered persecution and hardship under surrounding na tions. So, is that tenth-century prince of Rus’ really Vladimir (Russian), or is he Volodymyr (Ukrainian)? Was he the father of Russia or Ukraine? Kyiv and Moscow even have competing statues of him.
Right now, resentment and confusion lie deep. At a moment in which the very life of the Ukrainian nation is at stake, calls for reconciliation with Rus sia seem inappropriate. It is nevertheless a time in which there is a desperate need for agents of rec onciliation both within each country and between the two. I hope that my scholarly work can make a small contribution to that end.
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It would be wrong, I think, to call the Russian in vasion of Ukraine a holy war, although one could frame it as a kind of culture war between competing moral and religious ideals. Nevertheless, the Ortho doxy that now divides Russia and Ukraine (since 2019, Ukraine has had its own autocephalous Orthodox Church in addition to the historic Russian Orthodox Church) has the spiritual depth to help
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Russia and Ukraine in Theological Perspective
John Burgess is the James Henry Snowden Professor of Systematic Theology at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary.
the two nations make peace. The vision of trans figuring, divine beauty that Russians and Ukraini ans guard is not for themselves alone. It is a gift that their Orthodox faith offers all people, that all of us might envisage a world that God has rightly ordered and brought to peace.
On March 10, 2022, CTI hosted a webinar on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, moderated by CTI Director William Storrar and featuring CTI Members Mary Ellen O’Connell and John Burgess, who took part in CTI’s 2014-15 Inquiry on Law & Religious Freedom. The opening statements of O’Connell, a legal scholar at University of Notre Dame, and Burgess, a theologian based at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, are provided in edited form here.
As Karl Barth noted after World War II, political and economic interests are the principal drivers of war, but national leaders like to hide their ambitions behind high moral ideals. In Russia, these ideals are religiously tinged. Since the fall of communism, the Russian Orthodox Church has emphasized its responsibility to defend “traditional values”: patri otism, respect for authority, marriage as a union of one male and one female, and the sacrality of human life from the moment of conception. President Putin and Patriarch Kirill believe that they must now de fend these values in Orthodox Ukraine.
Historically, Russian Orthodoxy has been influ enced by Ukrainian Orthodoxy, and vice versa. Kyiv’s holy places—St. Sophia Cathedral, the Monas tery of the Caves—are also sacred to Russians, and Ukrainians have traditionally made pilgrimage to Russia’s holy places. I therefore have hope that in the long term Russians and Ukrainians will find good, positive ways to live together.
life of the Eastern Slavic peoples. It shaped their art, architecture, music, literature, ways of thinking— and, of course, their worship.
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4. Nevertheless, all states have a duty to refrain from aiding Russia’s war effort in any way. Passage over territory and through maritime straights, as well as military and financial assistance are all prohibited. States must refuse to extend legal recognition to the results of aggression.
Mary Ellen O’Connell is the Robert and Marion Short Professor of Law and Research Professor of International Dispute Resolution at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame.
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5. Because of the right of collective self-defense, states may provide military and other assistance to Ukraine and may impose robust sanctions, so long as they comply with the jus ad bellum principles of necessity and proportionality, and international human rights law.
1. Russia has committed the crime of aggression, which is a serious violation of Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter. Article 2(4) prohibits the threat or use of force against the territorial integri ty or political independence of any state.
This brief restatement of the most relevant law is trace able to Christian teaching on just war. For Christians, the use of force and violence is prohibited. Exceptions are made for self-defense and by legitimate authori ties to enforce the peace. These are narrow exceptions, which were in fact rejected by early Christian pacifists. St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and other theolo gians argued persuasively that people may defend them selves in what became over time the Christian Just War Doctrine. The Doctrine formed the basis of the international law that replaced the Holy Roman Empire and the Papacy with the emergence of co-equal sovereign states, following the European wars of religion.
By 2008, it was clear that support of the Soviet Union’s transformation to a democratic and peaceful state had been woefully inadequate. In early August 2008, following an attack by Georgia on Russian troops stationed in the Georgian provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, Russia went far beyond defending its forces. It attacked into undisputed territory to within 30 miles of the capi tal, Tbilisi, remaining in occupation of some areas until early October. The European Court of Human Rights subsequently ruled that Russia had committed wide spread human rights violations in areas under its control.
The catastrophe of World War II led to codifying the prohibition on the use of force in the United Nations Charter. Article 2(4) is uniformly considered a peremp tory or jus cogens norm, meaning it is of undoubted eth ical importance for all people and no derogation from it is permitted. Narrow exceptions for self-defense and Se curity Council authorization were also included in the Charter. Russia put forward several arguments related to self-defense in attacking Georgia and Ukraine, but these fall far short of the Charter’s requirement that self-de fense is permitted only in response to an armed attack and only if necessary to respond to the attack. Instead of the use of force, the Charter mandates the peaceful resolution of disputes in Article 2(3) and 33.
2. Violating Article 2(4) gives rise to Ukraine’s right of self-defense under Article 51. A state that is suf fering on-going armed attacks may use necessary and proportionate force in response for the pur pose of defense and may invite other states to join it in collective self-defense.
It is true that the United States and a few other states have committed serious violations of Article 2(4), espe cially since the end of the Cold War. These violations, however, have no impact on undermining a natural law, peremptory legal norm like Article 2(4). They do, how ever, weaken the respect with which the norm is held— they undermine its pull to compliance. The effort to day to defend Ukraine must be joined with an effort to defend the prohibition on the use of force. Christians everywhere can support through prayer, giving, teach ing, and advocacy. Americans can remedy the lack of generosity and vision thirty years ago now and in the aftermath of this brutal war.
3. Unless ordered by the United Nations Security Council, no state is obligated to use military force on behalf of Ukraine. There is no legal obligation to enforce no-fly zones, humanitarian corridors or the like.
From 1995-1998, I taught international law and conflict resolution at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies in Gar misch-Partenkirchen, Germany. The Center was found ed through a partnership between Germany and the United States in cooperation with NATO to support the transition to democracy of former Warsaw Treaty Organization countries, including Russia and Ukraine. The Center was intended to perform something like the function of the Marshall Plan for Europe following the Second World War. The Marshall Plan was an act of ex traordinary generosity, vision, and reconciliation, while the Marshall Center was little more than a recognition of the need for a second Marshall Plan.
In February 2014, Russian troops moved from their Black Sea naval base to occupy the Ukrainian prov ince of Crimea. Russian troops also moved into the Eastern Ukrainian provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk to support separatist fighters. On February 24, 2022, a massive Russian invasion force rolled into the rest of Ukraine with the apparent aim of ending its existence as an independent nation. Six critical points of interna tional law guide assessment of the invasion:
MARY ELLEN O’CONNELL
6. Russia and Ukraine are equally bound to respect international humanitarian law (IHL) in the con duct of fighting. Four core principles provide the foundations of IHL: civilian distinction, necessity, proportionality, and humanity.
Law and Peace in the Russia-Ukraine Conflict
The first director of CTI, Dr. Daniel Hardy, described the Center’s interdisciplinary mission as passing theology through the prism of other disciplines; it was about being open to their questions and so discovering new spectrums of theological thought that would otherwise be unseen. This is exactly what Jay Carter describes in his engagement with Black Studies and the critical study of Black religion, seeing theology and its relationship to the ecological crisis with new eyes.
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Jay, thank you for your superb William H. Scheide Lec ture on Religion and Global Concerns, sponsored by Ju dith McCartin Scheide and chaired by the Rev. Darrell Armstrong, both welcoming you on behalf of the Center of Theological Inquiry as members of our Board of Trust ees. Peter Paris and I first welcomed you to the Center in 2010 for a symposium on your book, Race: A Theological Account. Tell us something of your intellectual trajectory since then.
William Storrar
Myenvironment.researchrequired
J. Kameron Carter
me to venture out beyond some of the tools that were afforded me in the world of theologi cal thought. After the race book came out, around 2010 I found myself attracted to the work that was happen ing in Black Studies. Some might call it the new Black Studies, a deep form of critical thought and critical theory associated with such names as Fred Moten and Denise Ferreira de Silva, and writers such as Nathaniel Mackey, who I had started reading as a part of my train ing in literary theory at the University of Virginia, but I found myself returning to it.
J. Kameron Carter, Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington, delivered the William H. Scheide Lecture on Religion and Global Concerns in Princeton in March on the theme, ‘Creation Otherwise: Black Religion and Climate Catastrophe’. Professor Carter also took part in a research webinar with CTI Members around the world, discussing his lecture in the context of his wider intellectual work since the publi cation of his first book, Race: A Theological Account. He was joined by CTI Member Dr. Peter Paris, the Elmer G. Homrighausen Professor Emeritus of Christian Social Ethics at Princeton Theological Seminary, in conver sation with CTI’s Director, William Storrar, and Associate Director, Joshua Mauldin.
Now to your question as to my own intellectual trajec tory. It’s a good question as I continue to study theolo gy and try to reckon with the implication of this form of thinking with the imagination of a racial world and more broadly understanding theology’s implication in the crises of ecology and the devastation of our natural
That’s a good question. Before I answer it, I want to say again how grateful I am for the invitation to offer the Scheide Lecture and for everything I learned about Bill Scheide. I did not know who he was and the great work that he did philanthropically, his behind-the-scenes support in quite tangible ways of the development of civil rights in this country, the support that he gave for integration in Trenton, his alliance with the great Thur good Marshall, all of this was absolutely new to me. To learn of him and then to take in afresh the honor of offering a lecture that is named after him was indeed a privilege on my part, as is the great privilege I have to be in this conversation with Peter Paris, who has been a North Star for so many of us.
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In many respects Race: A Theological Account is me try ing to do a certain jujutsu with theology, to bend it, to take its own energy and turn it back on it and make it do something that it historically had not been doing and to make it do it under the force of Black religious life and Afro-Christian life particularly. Even as I was doing that, I was starting to appreciate my encounter with Long, and how he was putting a new kind of pres sure on me. He was saying to us, it’s not as simple as you think, even if you want to do this creative twisting. He kept leaning on me. The Race book is me basically saying, I hear you but I’m still going to do it the theo logical way.
But his material wouldn’t leave me alone and eventu ally it sunk in. His critique still holds. I had to figure out what to do with it. You’re hearing me now basical ly saying I think he’s right. Now given that, what do we do with it? You’re hearing my whole move towards Black faith as an aesthetic practice, influenced by Fred Moten’s book, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. If we are going to think about Af ro-Christianity, let alone other expressions of religious practice in the African diaspora, we need to understand them all as a kind of aesthetic practice. Somebody who’s committed to theology and wants to work in a register of theology can take up what I’m saying and say OK, we might then need to think of theological practice as an intellectual practice in ‘the break space’ we find in jazz, hip hop music, and the Blues. We need to aestheticize theology. That’s a way that you can read Long as not absolutely destroying theology, but he fundamentally revises how you have to approach it.
I started writing a series of essays across the decade of the 2010s, unpacking this new dimension and trajecto ry of my work and it matured over the decade and has now culminated in a trilogy project, the first volume of which will be out later this year, published through Duke University Press. The first volume is The Anarchy of Black Religion: A Mystic Song. Here I try to offer a new theory of Black religion where I think Black religion is on the one hand a modality of anarchy and on the other hand a practice of a certain kind of mysticism.
Like Peter said, I think I’m buying that tension. The more and more I got into theology the more and more I started to see that it’s quite implicated in so many cri
What I was discovering is that many of these folks who weren’t in the formal field of religious studies and theol ogy had what I came to call these religious signatures inside of their work. They were opening up questions that I was finding difficult to get towards in theology to the point where I was thinking of moving from theology and religious studies altogether and getting into a literature program. Interestingly, I became friends with Fred Moten and he said, “Jay, we need you to stay in religious studies and theology. We need people in Black Studies who really understand the depths of what’s going on in the worlds of theology and religious studies and can mediate these conversations.” So, I credit Fred Moten for inspiring me to stay in religious studies. That’s the first point. The second point is it was through the engagement with this literature in Black studies and Black critical thought that I was given new eyes to come back to theology and to appreciate a key person who has become central to my thinking now in new ways, the late Charles Long. In Race: A Theological Account, I have a chapter on Charles Long, but the chapter is written in such a way that it is a segway to James Cone, who is another important person for me. But as I got into Black Studies, I real ized through Black Studies that I did not have the tools to appreciate what Charles Long was saying. My pas sage through Black Studies brought me back to Charles Long. I had misunderstood the force of what he was getting at, and the implications are staggering for reli gious studies and for theological scholarship.
I’m really my grandmother’s child. As I tell people, all I’m trying to do is find the language to interpret the profound practices of faith that she lived out in the hood of West Philly where I’m from. If the epistemological project that is called theology as you described
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Anarchy is a word I purloined from Long himself. He started in a couple of occasions to use the word anarchy
Peter Paris
and so I seize upon his usage of this word. He meant it in the etymological sense from the Greek, arche, mean ing origin, ground, foundation, beginnings. Then the an on the front, an-arche, that’s where we get anarchy from: the upending of the origins, the un-tilling of the ground. If arche is about settling ground, then anarchy is about the unsettling of ground. You have the meta physical and epistemological valences of this word arche as the founding principles of knowledge. But then you have also the literal ecological orientations of this word where arche can also be ground. And so, I seize upon this on the one hand and think about Black religion as an anarchy, an unsettling of the grounds and the prin ciples that have organized the modern world. That’s a political and epistemological valence but it also opens onto ecological questions, unsettling the ways in which we’ve sedimented our world. In this unsettling against settler colonialism as a practice you have again a new kind of ecological orientation.
ses. My book on race shows it’s implicated in the prob lematics of race and now as I’ve been thinking about matters of ecology, it’s deeply implicated in that. The whole title of my talk, Creation Otherwise, is trying to name that. I tried to claim last night that in many respects Christian theology and its doctrine of creation hosts an orientation towards the Earth that is in many ways destructive. I know that there are many people trying to revise that and change it but as a historic descriptive matter that’s there. And yet I was trying to find a way to think past this.
there was good theology and there were bad theology and black liberation theology was on the side of good ness and doing what is right and just.
J. Kameron Carter
So, Jay’s lecture last night really brought back to me that ongoing debate and sometimes quite passionate struggle between these two approaches to the study of religion. I think that Jay has a big struggle here that he is wrestling with and we’re waiting for the book to come out that gives us some sort of direction as to how you can hold the two approaches together. It may be that one cannot do that. Jay may need to come to that conclusion at some point that maybe they cannot be held together.
Listening to Jay’s lecture last night brought back many good memories for me, particularly when the black the ology project first began with James Cone’s book, Black Theology and Black Power. Around that time a society was begun, the Society for the Study of Black Religion, a year after James Cone wrote his first book in 1969. That’s the launch of a significant conversation in the aca demic world, particularly amongst black scholars, about theology and religions. There was an ongoing conflict between the historians of religion and the theologians which the Society for the Study of Black Religion tried to hold together, trying to find some common ground. That came into focus with James Cone representing theology and Charles Long representing the historical, archaeological, anthropological study of religion. Cone had a great deal of respect for Long but still took many years to understand what Long’s critique was of theology. Charles Long was very radical in relation ship to theology because he really felt that theology was a European enterprise that was created for the fundamental purpose of justifying religiously the co lonial enterprise. The birth of theology from his point of view in the imperial Christian world established by Constantine was to give justification and actually to christianize the enterprise of colonialism. Now that’s a very radical thing to say and the people who were committed to the theological enterprise resisted it tre
The doctrine of creation bears within it an approach to knowing what we call a world. And what Wynter says is that our ways of knowing must be fundamentally re
So that puts a lot of pressure on Christian theology at that point. We’ve got to do some serious work. We have to ask some hard questions. What if we need to decolo nize the idea of God as owner? What if we need another imagination of what we call God that is not structured through the logic of ownership?
William Storrar
my work is trying to pick up on these kinds of currents and say, listen, we need to think about theolo gy as a structure of knowing the world. And my claim is that there are things embedded in the historic unfolding of this doctrine that are bound up with the ecological crisis. That’s what I’m arguing. And as I said last night, I’m trying to work out this distinction that I learned from a number of poets that the Earth and the World are not the same thing. There’s a distinction to be made between Earth and World. World is that idea of a singu lar oneness that’s imposed on top of the Earth. Du Bois says in effect that an imagination of World as an own able thing has been imposed on top of the Earth: the imagination of Earth as an ownable thing from which we can extract fossil fuels, labor, land, and even people.
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Jay and Peter, thank you for this seminal conversation on Black religion and the ecological crisis. CTI is that space you name so memorably for us, Jay, space to allow the questions to breathe.
These are the kinds of things that are bound up in the ecological crisis. You have to be in a space where you are allowed to air these things, that they can be real, you can be intellectual, space to allow the questions to breathe.
CTI Trustee Darrell Armstrong, CTI Trustee Judith McCartin Scheide, Professor J. Kameron Carter, and CTI Director William Storrar
That’s exactly right. Yes, it does. I want to invoke the great Sylvia Wynter here, the Jamaican cultural theorist and philosopher, novelist, and essayist. Wynter wrote an essay entitled Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom. One of the things she claims in that essay is that what colonialism did was it erected a cer tain frame of knowing. Colonialism hosts within it a way of knowing things, a way of knowing the Earth. If we’re going to decolonize our ways of existence, we have to decolonize how we know things. The structures of knowing must be decolonized. Part of what is at stake around the ecological crisis is how the ecological crisis is funded through how we claim to know the world. The ecological crisis is embedded in a certain practice of knowing things. How we know it. What is the world? What do we claim about it? Part of what needs to be broken is the structures of knowing.
J. Kameron Carter
Nowvised.
Peter Paris
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Now let’s get to theology. Theology is an epistemic prac tice. It is a mode of knowing. And we have certain doc trines through which we think about our knowing. One of them is the doctrine of creation. This was a key thing for Karl Barth, who spent a lot of time thinking about the doctrine of creation. Bonhoeffer also talked about the doctrine of creation and was making an argument, even before Barth, that we were in a crisis of creation.
it so beautifully, Peter, can’t quite cope with the mode of living that this woman enacted in West Philly, how then do I interpret it? What I have landed on increas ingly is she was a way maker. She was involved in the enterprise of making a way of no way. I want to take seriously that making.
Joshua Mauldin
Connecting with what Professor Paris said about that debate between theology and religious studies, it can be quite tense. You’re living in that tension and one of the few people moving across it. How does the ecological crisis help bring those two together? As you were say ing last night, the way we see the world theologically is important for how we deal with the environment. Therefore, we can’t just study religion as a descriptive phenomenon. We must have constructive theological discussions in the room. I’m saying that and then raising it as a question. Is that true? And how does that ecological element shape that discussion?
J. Kameron Carter
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Modern consumerism was one of the ways to temper our mimetic rivalries. Many of us were able to get the same con sumer goods that we desired by imitating our neighbors. This race of ever-hungry consumers contributed to a growth that went far beyond the limits of sustainability. To protect the natural environment, we need to overcome our futile rivalries as Serres understood so well: “We must decide on peace among ourselves to protect the world, and peace with the world to protect ourselves.”
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The capstone year of CTI’s five-year Inquiry on Religion & Global Issues, the 2021-22 Research Workshop has focused on Religion & the Natural Environment. CTI convened scholars from a range of disciplines and from across the globe to address this issue that is truly of global concern. This section on Climate Connections features the work of this year’s CTI members.
CTI’s Workshop on Religion & the Natural Environment
Wolfgang Palaver is Professor of Systematic Theology at the University of Innsbruck, Austria.
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brandishing sticks is fighting in the midst of a patch of quicksand.” Remarkably close to Carl von Clausewitz’s un derstanding that wars are like a grudge match that escalates to extremes, Goya shows that both fighters will end in de struction: Goya “has plunged the duelists knee-deep in the mud. With every move they make, a slimy hole swallows them up, so that they are gradually burying themselves together….The belligerents don’t notice the abyss they’re rushing into.” The modern danger of a nuclear war is just a more extreme type of this abyss. Serres also observes that by looking at this painting one easily ignores the “world of things themselves, the sand, the water, the mud, the reeds of the marsh.” In former times the natural environ ment was a threat to human beings. The modern world has turned this relation upside down: “The global change now underway … makes the power of the world precarious, in finitely fragile. Once victorious, the Earth is now a victim.”
WOLFGANG PALAVER
eace ethics and environmental ethics have often re mained disconnected. Usually, peace ethics is pri marily concerned with human relations and does not take nature as such into account. My own work on the relationship between violence and religion has followed René Girard’s mimetic anthropology that focuses especially on human behavior. Rivalries caused by imitative desires are, according to Girard, the main cause of human conflict, violence, and wars. Although human rivalry has a tremen dous influence on the natural environment, its impact was long unaddressed by scholars dedicated to mimetic theo ry. The French philosopher Michel Serres, who was also a close friend of Girard, opened our eyes by showing us how mimetic rivalries affect the natural environment. In 1990, Serres published his book Le contrat naturel, which came out in English in 1995 under the title The Natural Contract. It was a contribution to the Earth Summit of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Develop ment that took place in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992. Serres connects conflicts and wars among human beings with the destruction of the natural environment in his book. His starting point is a famous painting by the Spanish paint er Francisco de Goya (1746-1828) whose work frequently depicts the cruelty of modern wars that started with Na poleon. Serres chose Goya’s painting “Men Fighting with Sticks” from 1820, which shows how “a pair of enemies
Joshua Mauldin Associate Director
Mimetic Rivalries & Wars Against Nature
have learned so much during the CTI workshop and am eternally grateful to my colleagues for the ways in which their insights and questions have stretched my thinking. Our conversations have led me to consider the role of the artist in the age of the Anthropocene and to examine why art making continues to be a dominant and necessary impulse. These conversations have also helped me to recognize that my own research has always been rooted in questions of space and of place. In particular the “third space,” the liminal or the
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Elaine Rutherford is CTI’s Artist in Virtual Residence for spring 2022. She is a member of the art faculty at the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University in Minnesota.
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within the threshold is a space beyond oppositional parings of I and other and as such it is the terrain we must seek to inhabit in the age of the Anthropocene. It is the gray area, the space within the margins or as scholar J. Kameron Carter describes it as the “break space.” As long as we think within oppositional paradigms, we are fated to always see ourselves as separate from the natural world and from nature. When we learn how to inhabit the “break space” we open ourselves up to all possibility and new ways of knowing.
ELAINE RUTHERFORD
The bridge and the break
I’ve been painting all these bridges to cross the “break space” but maybe what I need is a path to take me into the break.
Awake, a wake, a sea path, After the bridge….. Instead of crossing to the other side I need to enter
The break Space The wake of the boat will show me the way.
At the threshold A bridge or something else A boat, a map To enter not cross This is where I need to be Inside the unbounded space Of the in-between Inside the break
The Break Space
War and violence, increasing economic inequality, poi sonous political partisanship, the dissolution of that basic
MARK DOUGLAS
Rethinking War in an Environmental Age
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hat do air conditioners, airplanes, cattle farms, and cryptocurrency have to do with Ukraine, Syria, Guatemala, and Sudan? One answer to that question is that the global proliferation of the former set of goods may have exacerbated con flicts in the latter set of countries. Maintaining the for mer set of goods, after all, not only involves expending significant amounts of energy—most of it coming from fossil fuels—but doing so in ways that intensify growing disparities between the “haves” and the “have nots” around the world. As fossil fuel consumption increases so do greenhouse gases and, therein, climate changes that deleteriously impact agriculture in these and other conflict-ridden countries, creating what environmental security experts call threat-multipliers and exacerbating suffering in such areas as attempts to control the flow of basic goods grows increasingly violent. And as economic disparities increase, so do political tensions and, therein the instability of a global political order shaped by early modern assumptions about the abundance of natural re sources and the rights of European countries to take such resources through conquest. Most of us in north Atlantic
Now, two books in—Christian Pacifism for an Envi ronmental Age (Cambridge UP, 2019) and Modernity, the Environment, and the Christian Just War Tradition (Cambridge UP, 2022)—I am writing the book that I imagined writing when I began my research. Wars in a Warming World: Religion, Resources, and Refugees draws from those earlier, historically-oriented books, to make a set of arguments about how persons of faith might understand and respond to climate-shaped conflicts. Among the regulating claims that come out of the first two books and now order my work are:
Writing against the grain of modernist assumptions about the world’s political, economic, religious, and en vironmental orders is no easy task. For that matter, nei ther is learning to see and name those assumptions. This year’s “Religion & the Natural Environment” workshop at the Center of Theological Inquiry has afforded me the chance to interact with other fellows who, like me, are feeling their way forward into ways of thinking, writing, and acting that reveal—in the best apocalyptic sense of that word—the world that is coming to be and finding hope in the midst of the political and environmental suf ferings being inflicted by wars in a warming world.
6. Among the ideas and practices most in need of review and critique are those that swirl around three focal points: the roles of religious ideas and practices in a world where they cannot be segre gated from wider politico-natural systems, the as sumptions about ownership and agency that have funded increasingly destructive neoliberal systems, and the increasing movement of peoples as such movements shape and are shaped by environmen tal and political forces. Hence, the subtitle of the book begun during my time at CTI.
Mark Douglas is Professor of Christian Ethics at Columbia Theological Seminary, Georgia, USA.
countries tend—maybe a bit willfully—not to pay atten tion to such connections. So perhaps a second answer to that question is that when those of us in the west are enjoying a temperate room on a hot day, a long-antici pated vacation, a good steak, or the freedom to invest in bitcoin, we’d rather not think that our behaviors make us complicit in causing, shaping, or exacerbating conflicts in other parts of the world.
A decade ago, I began research on a project exploring the impact of climate change on war and how Christian tra ditions of pacifism, just war, and just peacemaking would have to change to address some of the new types, causes, and understandings of war we face in the 21st century as we exit modernity and enter what I have begun to call an environmental age. In that age, environmental crises (ac celerating anthropogenic climate change, the catastrophic loss of biodiversity, the explosive growth in pollutants, and so on) will not only become increasingly preoccupy ing; they will become lenses through which we make sense of the world around us and the other crises we face in it.
political unit of modernity, the sovereign nation-state: all of these are connected in complicated ways to our dysfunctional relationships with the non-human natu ral world. The further I dug into the research, the more I discovered that needed digging into.
2. Complicity in violence is built into life in an envi ronmental age but not all people are equally com plicit. Rather than pursuing projects that involve attempts to separate oneself or one’s community from violence, human beings are called to take up morally ambiguous projects of reparative justice that include reparations towards those most neg atively affected by the politico-natural forces that drive life in an environmental age.
5. Minoritized voices—including those of Black, Brown, Indigenous, and other colonized peoples— are among those most in need of amplification, if for no other reason that they have been in loca tions where the earliest impacts of climate-shaped violence are most apparent and usually impressed upon their bodies. As their voices gain hearing, we will discover that political wisdom, like the natural world, is no respecter of boundaries.
1. One of the grand orienting myths of modernity— especially as it was shaped by Christian thought and practices—is a myth that separates the polit ical from the natural. This separation has made it difficult for those with power, especially in the west, to see the way that the natural and the po litical are always interwoven. Recognizing the in terwovenness of the natural and the political is, in creasingly, a precondition for meaningful political action.
4. Though the conventional narratives of the histories of the Christian just war, pacifist, and just peace making traditions are distorted by problematic modernist assumptions, the resources of these tra ditions—not to mention those of other religious traditions that take up questions about the relations of morality to violence—may play important roles in shaping responses to climate-shaped violence. As they do so, the distinctions between those traditions will become increasingly blurry and new narratives about the traditions will emerge.
3. Climate-shaped wars will look more chaotic, tend towards occasionality, be less oriented around ideological differences, be more widespread, and be exacerbated by the global proliferation of small arms. They may also admit to clearer assessments about when and how to fight because the value of natural resources is more amenable to strategic cal culus than, e.g., that of ideological commitments.
logical traditions and moral deliberations. Such centrality ex plains why some religion scholars, such as Bron Taylor, argue that Christianity can never be a “dark green” religion. Having said that, the contrast of naturalism seems unattractive: a sort of monistic model in which Nature is given priority. An associated point here is that climate change is a slow crisis—so the provocation to rethink theologically may not seem so urgent.
A slow crisis may be a deep crisis nonetheless.
And that does seem to me to be one conclusion: the coal car bon and petro-carbon civilization we know is using up its key source of energy. And the use of that energy drives warming.
Indirectly, I continue to pursue my inquiry in a theology for a postnatural condition. The climate crisis, and the ac companying ecological crisis, is a societal crisis as well as a planetary crisis—this is my argument. In my A Theology of Postnatural Right, I developed an ethics for a condition marked by the absence of sharp boundaries between human and nonhuman, between nature and history, and between nature and technology, and one that does not rely on a fixed natural order. I’m developing that account in my current project on theological materialism. I’m not approaching the climate crisis directly but seek to approach it through the social crisis that, in a sense, generated it.
What about academic theology in the climate crisis?
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Directly and indirectly. I’m the director of the Lincoln Theo logical Institute at the University of Manchester and we have hosted three projects to date relating to the climate crisis. The first one explored apocalyptic discourse in relation to a warming climate and the second developed a contextual and systematic theology for a changing climate. Most recent ly, we explored with partners the phenomenon of climate change from interfaith perspectives. In my own writing, not least in a contribution to Ernst Conradie’s and Hilda Koster’s amazing volume on Christian Theology and Climate Change, I’ve been exploring the theme of theological anthropology and the vocation of the human in the Anthropocene.
As for academic theology, I think that climate change provokes a kind of theological crisis—as suggested by the question. Indeed, we had a the ology of crisis arise out of the emergency of twentieth century fascism in Europe on account of the profundity of the questions raised about Christian responsibility. The challenge of climate change is also civili zational and thus no less profound. Plus, there is the matter that many of the key human voices in the crisis are the voices of the vulnerable in the global south. If theology is not able to hear these in some fashion, we must wonder whether the theological responses are framed or struc tured by a kind of colonial deafness. There is vital work to be done in the area of postcolonial ecotheology—there is an important volume out very recently, edited by S. Lily Mendoza and George Zachariah, titled
How does your own theological inquiry connect with the climate crisis?
stream churches are resistant to this climate change agenda—at least no more resistant than any other sector of civil society. There is of course what Robin Globus Veldman calls a gospel of climate scepticism—but her argument is that this scepticism is not a matter of climate science but of a self-declared sense of cultural marginalization. When COP26 was held in Glasgow in 2021 there was a significant civil society presence in which faith traditions were prominent.
clear warfare have never gone away, the invasion of Ukraine has seen renewed attention paid to the threat of a nuclear war and an end of civilization. In the mid 1980s, Gordon Kaufman already made the connection and I think we need to do the same now.
Peter Scott is the Samuel Ferguson Professor of Applied Theology & Director of the Lincoln Theological Institute at the University of Manchester, UK.
Are there reasons to be cheerful?
So it seems unlikely that this civilization can endure—even if we find a way of retrofitting our current way of life with differ ent sources of energy. A sort of energy conversion, an energy metanoia is required. Religions know about metanoia—and so I find that a hopeful thought. I also find it encouraging that the carbon we are using is compressed or sedimented life; it was organic once although it is now non-organic. That makes me think that there may be processes underway now that may resource future generations of creatures.
My response may strike the reader as complacent or banal, but I think there is a sense in which theology is hopeful; the ology is always a theology of hope. That is, as Jürgen Molt mann once said, theology is eschatology or eschatology is the medium of theology. Theology works back, so to speak, from the much anticipated meeting of heaven and earth. Still, as Moltmann has also never tired of saying, hope is not opti mism—and I see few reasons to be optimistic. So does hope defeat pessimism? The comparison of climate change with nuclear warfare is interesting: both point towards the end of a civilization. And although the moral issues around nu
Reflections on
Climate change—and the present lack of urgency in the decisions to impede its further development—suggest that humans continue to act based on short-term and more or less exclusively human-related desires, without taking into account how humanity itself is interwoven with other types of life and environments over which we only have limited control. We prioritize the desire for hu man consumption over the flourishing of all of creation. It is against this backdrop that it makes sense to speak of sin in relation to climate change. Then, what happens is not just another example of sin, but we can understand how sin manifests itself in concrete human practices, in misguided desire, and in the lack of concern for the vul nerable conditions of everything that lives.
Everything that lives strives to continue to live and indeed to flourish. In order to flourish, we need the conditions that can make it happen. The desire to live, and live well, is not restrict ed to humans but is behind how every living being acts. Desire connects us to what we as sume is good. The difference between humans and other species is in how we deal with, order, and orient our desires for the good. Whereas most other species act on instincts, we can act based on reasons and insights, which can help
Jan-Olav Henriksen is Professor of Systematic Theology at Norwegian School of Theology, Religion, and Society.
As I write this, in early April 2022, a new report about the urgency of action to impede climate change has just been released. Theology may be a resource for a different understanding of what is good that considers the flourishing of all of cre ation. We must understand desire as something that can connect us to other values than those presently guiding the actions of humanity. Theol ogy can also point to the precariousness of all that lives insofar as it knows that life is not something we can take for granted. Life is always dependent on sources other than our agency. However, this does not eliminate our responsibility for acting and acting now to counter the worst consequenc es of climate change.
We share the desire for goodness and flourishing with other species. But we also share vulnerability with the rest of the living beings on planet Earth. The challenge is to orient our desires so that flourishing for all is possible and take suf ficiently into account the vulnerable condition on which all life lives. In other words: desire and vulnerability are connected. But they can be connected in different ways.
If we act on false premises, we may quickly realize the con sequences. These consequences point to our vulnerable condition. Wrong decisions and misdirected desires may cause us a lot of trouble, sometimes with devastating con sequences. Moreover, it may not only reveal how humans are vulnerable but also how other species and non-human nature are vulnerable and susceptible to our activity. But vulnerability is not only negative: it is because we are vul nerable and receptive that we can experience ourselves as interconnected with others, respond to what is happening in ways that make us react, and sometimes also protect ourselves or others from harm and misconduct.
ResponseTheological to Climate Change
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us change the society we live in and the values upon which we act. It also entails that humans may be wrong in how we direct our desires. Hence, a fundamental task as human beings is to find the best way to order our desires and act accordingly.
If we address the problems facing the planet only as examples of how sin affects all areas of human life, this may sound like good theolo gy, but I think it is not. Then these problems are just illustrations of something else. I work from the presupposition that we need to see the problems from another angle, which allows us to address the problems as related to fundamental phenomena in human life, and in other species’ lives as well. The two phenomena I have in mind are desire and vulnerability.
JAN-OLAV HENRIKSEN
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In my work, I use Western consumerism as an example of how our desires are directed in ways that hide the consequences of our actions while simultaneously also contributing considerably to the planet’s deterioration. We know that not all of the Earth’s population can enjoy the same level of consumption that we have in the Western world without devastating consequences. Nevertheless, our culture of consumption seems to go on more or less unconcerned. Consumption helps us ig nore the awareness of our misguided desires, and the consequences consumption has on our vulner able planet. Thus, sin is not only about being in a wrongful relationship with God, but it is about how our activity contributes to the destruction of God’s creation. Sin has material consequences that can be detected in how we expose other humans and the planet in general to their negative vulnera bilities. It is not only a spiritual phenomenon.
To speak theologically about climate change entails that we speak about concrete things that happen and address them in ways that provide us with a more profound un derstanding of our agency. If we speak only about the sin ful human condition as the cause of climate change, we miss out on the chance to understand the basic desires we act on and what and who is vulnerable to and may suffer from these actions.
hat can theology say about climate change? This question is at the cen ter of my current research, in which I focus on how to understand the conditions for human agency in the Anthropocene. The An thropocene era is defined as the era of history in which the whole planet Earth is impacted by hu man activity. This era is the context for the pre carious problems we face today: climate change, extinction of species, landslides, forest fires, and clearing of the rainforests, but also social injus tice and economic inequality. These phenomena are connected to human activity and place us in a situation in which we share the responsibility for how we deal with them in order to make the future of the planet livable for all.
ANDY WIGHTMAN
Land Rights and Governance
None of that will happen without a huge paradigm shift, but the elements of such relationships have existed for a long time in the world’s religions and beliefs, in environmental ethics, classical economics, and philosophy. Whilst science and poli tics drive the response to the climate crisis, the shifts in public attitudes necessary to tackle the crisis will be driven yes by science but more deeply out of a deep sense of necessity and obligation towards our fellow humans and the natural world.
I have enjoyed participating in CTI’s inquiry on theology and
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That is why bringing theological insights and wisdom, vi sionary scientific communications, literary, artistic, and po etic endeavor, and a renewed humanity is so vital in tackling
from Australia, was researching the issue of sea level rise and displacement in Fiji, which gave me my first insight into the seriousness of forced migration on a larger scale if climate change progresses even further. To learn more about environmental issues, I reen tered graduate school and am currently studying for a degree in environmental studies.
n my country of Japan, heavy rain has been falling in recent years, causing some villages to be flood ed or houses in the mountains to be swallowed by landslides. Such annual disasters that cause so many deaths were uncommon a few decades ago. The fact that this situation is caused by climate change perme ates the awareness of Japanese society in general, and disaster countermeasures are being implemented at a rapid pace. Although people have different opinions about whether climate change is caused by anthropo genic factors or the natural cycle of events, we must know that it is the socially vulnerable who suffer the most from disasters. People often think that natural disasters uniformly impact the people living in the affected area, which is correct in one sense because the rain falls equally under the rain clouds; however, the rainfall does not impact individual people in the same manner. When floodwater inundates a town, those who lose their lives are the sick, the old, and those with disabilities. From this perspective, I am currently researching and teaching at a university on ethical issues such as structural discrimination in cli mate Whenchange.Ifirst participated in CTI’s Research Work shop on Religion & Migration in 2017-2018, led by Peter C. Phan of Georgetown University, my views on migration were limited to the obvious push-pull factors. My colleague at that time, Seforosa Carroll
s humans we are conditioned to respond to threats to ourselves and to our community and fight or flight is one of our most primitive instincts. However, the magnitude, scale, and scope of our current environmental crisis has overwhelmed these instincts. Over half of the an thropogenic emissions of carbon have taken place since the Climate Convention was signed in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. Even in the face of overwhelming evidence, the world is not acting with sufficient urgency and commitment.
KANAN KITANI
Theology is not a discipline that fixes itself on events that occurred 2000 years ago but one that engages in dialogue with the realities occurring in society today. In this age called the Anthropocene, one of the most important practical issues is how to coexist with the natural environment. I am fortunate to be able to im mediately return to graduate school so that I can retrain in environmental studies, but there are far more people who cannot. Therefore, as an educator and a pastor, I feel it is part of my role to take the learning I have gained and give it back to students and congre gations in my university and church. I cannot change the world alone, but sharing what I know about en vironmental issues at my university and church may be akin to planting a seed of inspiration, just as Pope Francis stated in his well-respected encyclical Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home: “Ecological edu cation can take place in a variety of settings: at school, in families, in the media, in catechesis and elsewhere. Good education plants seeds when we are young, and these continue to bear fruit throughout life.”
In part this is a governance problem. Given the scale of the crisis, expecting 192 governments to sit down each year at a climate conference and agree how to implement and finance both existing and future agreements has not and is not likely to produce the progress needed. Without a legal framework that imposes duties and responsibilities with effective sanc tions for non-compliance, short-term interests will prevail.
Kanan Kitani is an assistant professor of theology at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan.
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and writing on land rights and governance, it is clear to me that we need a new relationship with the land and with the Earth. That relationship to date has been primarily trans actional, commercial, exploitative, and short-term. What is required is a relationship based on nurture, stewardship, re sponsibility, duty, and reciprocity.
Andy Wightman is a writer and researcher on land & environmental governance and is based in the Highlands of Scotland.
From Theology to Environmental Studies
humans began to sense their dual, if somewhat conflicting, obligations: to bond with our home planet and care for it, and—ultimately—to transcend Earth in a techno-spiritual pursuit of other worlds on which to perpetuate our species. To love Earth and leave it. The whole Earth vision contains within it a paradox that is reproduced in many high-pro file efforts to tackle global environmental problems with emerging technologies. Here technology—or what I call techno-environmentalism—functions simultaneously as a vehicle for drawing closer to nature and a means of throwing off natural limits altogether.
In particular, my work explores issues surrounding extinc tion and de-extinction; climate change and geoengineering; and the pursuit of “ecopoiesis” (the creation, on Earth and in space, of new lifeforms and novel ecosystems from non living or artificial conditions). These initiatives illustrate techno-environmentalism’s odd mixture of intimacy with and estrangement from nature. While these projects rou tinely tout their concern for nature and desire to improve the planet, they also celebrate portraits of humans that—at best—distance humans from nature and at worst bolster extravagant claims of human exceptionalism. Central to these technological endeavors is a quasi-secular theological anthropology of Homo sapiens as a worldmaking animal, a distinctly planetary creature whose development as a species both mirrors and advances a larger cosmic drama. Our pur ported power to radically remake our environment, in other words, obviates the need to change ourselves at a fundamen tal level.
LISA
Connections between my current project—a book tenta tively titled Unearthly Ethics—and the themes of the CTI workshop are numerous. In fact, this work draws from my previous participation in CTI’s Inquiry on the Societal Implications of Astrobiology, a topic that proved extremely generative for both my teaching and research. These con nections include: questions about home and displacement; the nature of human and nonhuman agency in the An thropocene; the challenge of defining a new morality, or new narrative, appropriate to our current global crises; the way in which science and technology foster an implicit faith in human exceptionalism; and how wonder might be cultivated in nondestructive ways.
The third essay explores how Christian realism could be extend ed to environmental ethics generally and what it would enjoin amidst anthropogenic climate change specifically. I maintain that Christian realism combines environmental activists’ belief in a constructive human future with environmental pessimists’ conviction that human beings are now unable to attain it by integrating Christian anthropology, a Niebuhrian account of sin, politically realist skepticism about social groups’ sustained self-transcendence, and Augustinian hope. This conjunction allows Christian realism to confront the severity of the climate crisis and the global order’s knowing failure to forestall it with out fostering despair, thereby dispelling the denial, distraction, enervation, and desperation that exacerbate this failure even as they emerge to cope with it. I therefore expect Christian realism will have an ever-greater role to play in Christian responses to the looming environmental losses and I develop Christian realism’s distinctive interpretation of social ethics and salvation history to prime it to do so.
My scholarship concentrates on theological ethics and the relationships between theol ogy and the natural sciences. In connection with this year’s inquiry at CTI, I am conducting re search for three essays concerning theology and the natural environment.
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emissions given this new reality. I argue that because culpably insufficient redress of climate change has rendered even subsis tence GHGs so harmful, most forthcoming western GHG emissions that are not removed have become unjust, though some forthcoming western subsistence GHG emissions that are not removed remain responsible.
TheologicalEthics&ClimateChangeFREDERICKSIMMONS
Augustine and Niebuhr agree that such hope does not anticipate historical progress, hence its compatibility with environmental pessimism. Nevertheless, ordering such hope to love clarifies that it does not condone historical indifference and instead properly animates and sustains ameliorative initiatives.
Frederick Simmons is a Research Assistant Professor of Ethics at Boston University School of Theology, the John Templeton Foundation Research Scholar at Princeton Theological Seminary, and the Houston Witherspoon Fellow in Theology and the Natural Sciences at the Center of Theological Inquiry.
Lisa Sideris is Professor of Environmental Studies at UC Santa Barbara.
The first essay reassesses the ethics of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Heretofore, most ethical misgiv ings about GHG emissions have concentrated on the subset attributable to luxuries. However, further sub sistence GHG emissions alone now seem liable to end the Holocene—the current, roughly 12,000-year-old geological epoch with an unusually stable and clement climate that has allowed agriculture and civilization to emerge. I draw on the principle of double effect and the just war tradition to reevaluate the ethics of GHG
The term “Overview Effect” names the powerful feelings of wonder and interconnectedness elicited by Earth as seen from the “outside.” Celebrated by scientific and spiritual seekers alike, this perspective marks a dramatic leap forward in human consciousness. And yet, at this pivotal moment,
I am grateful to CTI for such a stimulating and collegial environment in which to pursue my research questions and enhance my scholarly networks.
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The second essay reexamines Christian hope amidst escalating en vironmental pessimism. It starts by observing that this pessimism compromises the widespread contemporary Christian hope that God’s consummation of creation emerges through historical prog ress. This pessimism thereby also prompts Christians to reconsid er their traditional hope that God’s consummation of creation is realized beyond history. Although such supra-historical hope can withstand escalating environmental pessimism, for that reason it has fostered indifference to the environmental destruction driving this pessimism. To uncouple this hope from that indifference, I modify Reinhold Niebuhr’s interpretation of the relationship be tween the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love. In particular, while Niebuhr emphasizes faith in God’s overcoming of perenni al human failure and punctures human pretensions to surmount that failure through love, Augustine orders faith and hope to love.
UnearthlySIDERISEthics
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ne day in 1966, the environmentalist and tech-vi sionary Stewart Brand took a dose of LSD and gazed at the San Francisco skyline. He could feel the curve of the earth. He imagined drifting further and further into space, taking in the full arc of its curvature. Brand petitioned NASA to release photos of the Earth taken from space. In 1967, NASA released the photo, and Brand placed it on the cover of his Whole Earth Catalog, a countercultural do-it-yourself manual for tech enthusi asts seeking to get back to nature. This image, along with the iconic “Earthrise” photo, evoked feelings of global oneness. Astronauts who witnessed this view of the Earth firsthand reported a cognitive shift in awareness, an awefilled appreciation of Earth’s fragile interconnectedness.
WILLIAM BARBIERI
One ecological issue that has long accompa nied my teaching and research in my home field of religious studies—but has lately come into sharper focus—is the matter of the “green ing” of the world’s religions. One after another, major religious traditions have in recent de cades belatedly acknowledged deficits in their attention to environmental problems and un dertaken to modify their teachings and prac tices accordingly. This process generates a host of compelling questions for the comparative religious ethicist. How has this shift occurred? Why now? To what extent can religious com munities self-consciously embrace the ethos of ecology without damaging the integrity of their traditional commitments? Which traditions are best positioned to cope with this challenge? Does the “greening” of religion constitute an instance of moral progress?
In recent years, motivated by a sense of mounting urgency, my efforts as a scholar of religious ethics have converged from a number of directions on questions related to the ecological crisis. Ethics as I envision it is a wide-ranging en terprise that trawls through several neighboring disciplines in pursuit of responses to a complex of questions concern ing human action, values, meaning, and motivations. Part of the work involves describing what morality is and how it works, and part of it involves mounting normative ar guments about what we should take to be good, right, or
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William Barbieri teaches in the Religion and Culture and Moral Theology/Ethics programs in the School of Theology and Religious Studies and directs the Peace and Justice Studies Program at The Catholic University of America.
ethics of war—as integrated with, and insep arable from, the ecological imperative to care for creation.
On the practical side, I see the notion of in tegral ecology as establishing promising syner gies between two traditionally discrete moral projects: the environmentalist movement and campaigns for social justice and human rights. The crucial question becomes: how can ethi cal perspectives on the ecological crisis—espe cially religiously grounded ones—help “move the needle” when it comes to changing envi ronmentally destructive behaviors? One small contribution I hope to make on this ques tion stems from my interest in the theme of “visual ethics”: that is, the study of how im ages can convey moral content and provide ethical motivation in ways that elude texts and discourse. My teaching and research on “ecocinema” suggests that the medium of film can help promote ecological responsibility.
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My location at the Catholic University of America has deepened my interest in and en gagement with the tradition of social ethical thought known as Catholic social teaching, and here again ecological questions have new ly come to the fore. Indeed, on my reading of Pope Francis’s monumental 2015 encyclical letter Laudato si’, the Catholic moral outlook is undergoing a paradigm shift that is reconstitut ing social teaching within a more encompassing perspective that might be termed “earth ethics.” Francis’s own name for this emergent frame work is “integral ecology”—a term pointing to how, going forward, Catholicism envisions all matters related to human dignity—from sexual morality and bioethics to social justice and the
As a religious ethicist, I see the conception of integral ecology as pointing to a set of topics ripe for further exploration. On the theoreti cal side, I have begun investigating the idea of “moral ecology.” This term designates for me the fruitful intersection of two traditionally discrete bodies of knowledge: earth science and ethics. On the one hand, scientific understandings of ecology have begun to engage in an en counter with their moral implications. On the other hand, in ethics a new sensibility has arisen recognizing that morality itself can be thought of as exhibiting certain ecological features. One of my current research projects is dedicated to gauging the prospects for an ecological model of morality as a moral theory that might update aspects of traditional natural law theory.
just. Pursuing these questions naturally takes one into the fields of philosophy and psycholo gy, religion and theology, politics and sociology, and beyond—with the charge of dilettantism an ever-present occupational hazard.
Religious Ethics & Integral Ecology
AFTERARCHITECTUREABRAHAM
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Karin Morse, CTI’s Director of Philanthropy, reports on this webinar series and its rich conversation on architecture across the Abrahamic traditions. We invite you to watch these dialogues in full on our website, ctinquiry.org.
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Architecturally, there is no prescrip tion to make a sacred space. In west ern culture, the distinction between sacred and secular is more pronounced
Piazza del Campo Siena, Tuscany
Murray Rae Professor of Theology, University of Otago, New Zealand
Our Architecture After Abraham webinar series is an example of this approach as we seek fresh insights from our research on religion and the built environment. Director William Storrar was our moderator as we brought together three authors, colleagues, and practitioners in architecture in conversation on the three Abrahamic traditions, exploring how these religions have profoundly affected our built environment throughout history and today. In three conversations, these scholars shared with us their insights, making connections across traditions and cultures.
Late medieval and renaissance cities in Europe expressed a strong commitment to public space representing a vibrant communal Christian faith. The number of “hospitale” built during this time give architectural form and expression to the Christian commitment to care for the vulner able, the orphan, the stranger. These places of refuge were not merely functional spaces, but exquisite buildings confirming to the world the fundamental theological commitment of care for our neighbor. This same sense of communal wel fare is seen in the creation of public squares. The Piazza del Campo in Siena is a poignant example
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of the intentional creation of a space to provide for all aspects of social life— commerce, entertainment, festivals, and also refuge when the city was un der siege. Architecture, like the piazza, preserves a more relational understand ing of our human identity.
The Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego, California by Louis I. Kahn
The city was also designed to facilitate and invite participation in the Chris tian faith. Religious festivals with grand processions utilized the built environ ment as a backdrop for the liturgical narrative. These festivals paused spe cifically at significant holy sites, which were part of the community’s everyday reality, not far-removed edifices.
he first webinar featured Murray Rae and his book, Architecture and Theology: The Art of Place, which focuses on architecture in the western Christian tradition and the narra tive quality of our built environment. Architec ture from this perspective is a form of commu nication, telling us stories about what we believe and how we understand our identity as a people.
Alexander Gorlin Architect Alexander Gorlin of Alexander Gorlin Architects, NYC Laurentian University, Canada
The Salk Institute designed by Louis Kahn is a secular lab presenting a pow erful modern example of sacred space. Created for the activity of science, its design brings the idea of the sacred into its program by conveying a connection between immanence and tran scendence. We can imagine scientists working inside the two buildings on either side of the channel of water and then when coming outside, confront ed by a vista we cannot reach, as we cannot touch God. The scene before us invokes the idea of the immediate and remote, the idea of the presence of the moment and what can be, the unknowable. Leading to the discussion amongst our three authors—what is sa cred space? Is it the space itself or the use of the space that makes it sacred?
CTI connects theological wisdom to global issues through a model of interdisciplinary research and dialogue. It is in the dialogue between the disciplines where we make discoveries and bring about new understanding.
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Gorlin presented a series of architectural examples incorporating Kabbalistic design concepts, with two in particular having the most architectural implications in design. The first is Tzimtzum, which is the void at the beginning of the universe. In Kabbal ah, the world is not created through action, but through a withdrawal of God. This idea of pulling away is at the heart of Kabbal ah. The concept of a vacuum for creation, where God is not, animates and inspires ar chitectural ideas.
and increasingly reflected in modern archi tecture with churches situated as “set apart” spaces, not integrated into daily life. More and more, churches are out of the city center, surrounded by parking lots and used primar ily once a week. Are we witnessing a major shift as we see museums for example, taking the place of churches on the weekends as the new “shrines” of the people? Is the activity changing what is considered sacred?
The way light creates and cuts space out of the darkness can be seen in Tadao Ando’s Church of the Light in Japan, recalling the phrase from Isaiah 45:7, “I make peace and create darkness. I make and create evil. I am the Lord and do all these things.” The scene has the duality of light and dark, of good and evil, which are imbedded in the Kab balah in a very specific and gendered way; male and female.
The Jewish Museum in Berlin, Germany by Daniel Libeskind
The Sanctuary in the North Shore Hebrew Academy by
Take another look at the Salk Institute, two buildings on either side with the folded con crete walls and how they frame the open space that pulls the sky into the earth, the void. The use of “void” is especially striking in Daniel Libeksind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin where a series of voids creates a visible and tangible sense of loss.
he use of light is a key concept in Alexander Gorlin’s conversation on his book, Kabbalah in Art and Architec ture. In searching for inspiration in designing a temple, he discovered the work of Gershom Scholem and specifically Rabbi Isaac Luria’s creation story, where concepts of Kabbalah, space, light, and geometry, deepened his un derstanding of the spiritual world and en riched his architectural creation.
In the synagogue project that led Gorlin to first discover the concepts of Kabbalah, we see these vessels of light as the main in spiration in the design. The ark, where the scrolls of the Torah are stored, is typically a dark closet, but here a glass ark becomes a
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The other concept with architectural signif icance is Vessels of Light, Ohr Ha’Kelim. In the creation story after the withdrawal, light pours into the space of the void, creating various patterns with points of light rever berating, refracting, and then coalescing into vessels of light, which are themselves made of light, hovering in the void.
Church of the Light in Osaka, Japan by Tadao Ando
luminous body of light that refracts onto the congregation itself. Looking closer, this cube of light is inscribed with two in verted triangles which when viewed from the center become the Star of David. This kind of shifting sculpture also reflects the interlocking triangles of the Sefirot, which is the diagram of the ten emanations of the divine in Kabbalah.
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about the people who use it and give it life. A sign of good architecture is that it can fa cilitate and actively bring people together and is welcoming, demonstrating the pow erful impact of architecture on behavior.
Light across the traditions has been a con necting point in the three conversations. To close our conversations, we end with a view of a mosque in the northern terri tories with limited sunlight in winter. In a traditional mosque, the mihrab is dec orated with pictures of paradise or words of paradise. In the Prince George Islamic Centre in British Columbia, transparent glass provides a view of a Northern para dise. It is a breath-taking example of archi tecture adapting to a different landscape, bridging our built and natural environ ments into one.
Vessels of Light recalls a direct passage in the Quran, “light upon light.” There is a strong parallel in the understanding of light in the three Abrahamic faiths, man ifested differently, but consistent between the three. Light is the universal architec tural element that cuts across all traditions as it is such an important symbol of transcendence, of God revealing truth.
By studying a wide sampling geographi cally and chronologically, you can observe patterns. The earliest, pioneering mosques in the communities Gaber studied tended to be inclusive, inviting a larger audience. We see people from different backgrounds and different traditions joining together to share space. When talking about the dias pora, the mosque brings people together for a variety of activities. The design is based on the need. In looking to the reconstruction of the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina, that prototypical mosque included space for everything. In the Islamic faith not much furniture is needed. You need a clean surface such as a personal rug or a large one for groups, a place to perform Wudhu, the rit ual washing before prayers, and the mihrab, the wall niche orienting worshipers towards Mecca. These primarily open spaces can be used for a variety of purposes, adapting as the needs of the community change.
—Karin Morse
In her travels throughout Canada, Tammy traveled to 53 cities, visiting 90 mosques representing various traditions, document ing not only architectural details, but also the communities. Bricks and mortar can give you an analytical representation of a space, but equally important is learning
A Northern View of Paradise at the Prince George Islamic Centre, Prince George, British Columbia, Canada. Designed by Senbel Studio.
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Tammy Gaber visiting the Great Mosque of Sousse in Tunisia in 1997.
wo “voids” inspired Tammy Gaber’s journey to write her book, Beyond the Divide: A Century of Canadian Mosque Design. In her undergraduate stud ies, textbooks referred mostly to the west ern canon of architecture, and as a fearless adventurer, she began traveling the world to learn about architecture not included in typical course materials. As a Muslim growing up in Canada, she noticed that nearly every mosque had a different space for women. She wondered why that was the case. During her pilgrimage to Mecca, a sacrosanct place, men and women were not segregated, but rather side-by-side leading to another question, “What is hap pening in the mosques?”
Which theological texts do you return to most often?
When did you decide to become a theologian?
A Resident Member during CTI’s Inquiry on Religious Experience and Moral Identity (2013-14), Nüssel works at the intersection of dogmatic and ecumenical theology. This spring, Nüssel gave the prestigious Warfield Lectures at Princeton Theological Seminary, and following the lecture series she took part in this conversation with CTI’s Associate Director, Joshua Mauldin.
The interdisciplinary institute in Heidelberg is a special type of institute for advanced studies. We decided that we would have it first of all for our university itself. So you can ap ply there to be freed from teaching to join a small group and to undertake an interdisciplinary project. It connects researchers from various disciplines in Heidelberg in the first instance, and it has quite a good impact, because it helps dis ciplines like theology get into conversation with disciplines that have not been interested in theology for a long time. For theology that is certainly a very good thing.
What advice would you give to aspiring theologians? Inspire as many people as possible, use opportunities to speak to and write for a wider audience.
You are the director of the Ecumenical Institute at Heidelberg University. How do you define ecumenical theology?
You are also the director of an interdisciplinary institute (the Marsilius-Kolleg) at the University of Heidelberg. How do you think about theology as an interdisciplinary endeavor?
Friederike Nüssel: The lectures were titled “Dynamics of the Spirit,” and the subtitle tells you the program, “A Pneumato logical Approach to Dogmatics.” My goal was to develop the central dogmatic themes from the perspective of the spirit or pneumatology; to go through the different themes of Trinity, creation, redemption, reconciliation, and discuss what the role of the spirit is throughout.
After the Bible? The Catechisms of Martin Luther or Bonhoeffer’s “Widerstand und Ergebung” (Letters and Papers from Prison). In the English speaking world I would recommend Douglas Ottati’s A Theology for the Twenty-First Century and Michael Welker’s Gifford Lectures.
When I graduated from High School at the age of 18.
Joshua Mauldin: What was the topic of your recent Warfield Lectures?
Quick Takes
What books of theology would you recommend to a lay reader?
How do you think about the role of theology in society and in the university?
What we in Germany would call systematic theology or dogmatic theology involves interpreting central Christian themes in a way that connects scripture, the tradition, and
Who has been the biggest theological influence on your work? Wolfhart Pannenberg
Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics, Pannenberg’s Systematic Theology, Tillich’s Systematic Theology
contemporary questions people have today. Theology con nects these areas, and the main task is to provide orienta tion. In my view, theology is first of all important in terms of education. My primary aim is to help students to receive the formation they need to do their jobs in various fields in which theology is required; in the church, of course, but also in Germany there are many other fields where theology is a required part of the curriculum.
I would begin by noting that theology is itself very inter disciplinary in nature. If you look at the combination of different disciplines and their methods within the field of theology or religious studies, you find historical methods, systematic methods, a number of practical methods, and so on. So theology is already interdisciplinary. And since the Christian faith relates to all important questions about the world, about human beings, about the ground of being, about political and social issues, it must be interdisciplinary from the beginning. But today we have a very large variety of disciplines and many of them feel very disconnected from theology, so it is important for theology to take part in con versations with other disciplines in order to discuss findings in those fields, but also to take into account what other dis ciplines are interested in, what their research methods are, what their principles are, in order to incorporate this knowl edge into one’s theological perspective. And this should be seen as a mutual conversation among disciplines.
COLLOQUYINTERVIEW
FriederikeWITHNüssel
Friederike Nüssel is Professor of Systematic Theology and director of the Ecumenical Institute at Heidelberg University. She is also the director of Marsilius-Kolleg (Institute for Interdisciplinary Inquiry) at the university.
Ecumenical theology is the part of theology that responds to the ecumenical movement of the churches as it developed since 1910 with the World Missionary Conference; since that time churches have built up various ways of interac tion in dialogue but also in charity work and in mission. The task of theology here is to facilitate research and findings that are important for this dialogue and also for understand ing contextual matters in theology. So ecumenical theology looks very much to churches and their interaction, but since churches themselves have a number of interreligious connec tions, ecumenical theology has to go beyond denominational discussions and reach out to interreligious topics.
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Jan-Olav Henriksen
Exploring how the climate crisis discloses the symbol deficit in the Christian tradition, this book argues that Christianity is rich in symbols that identify and address the failures of humans and the obstacles that pre vent humans from doing well, while positive symbols that can engage people in constructive action seem underdeveloped.
Climate Change and the Symbol Deficit of the Christian Tradition - Expanding Gen dered Sources
Elements of Christian Thought
Ulrich Schmiedel
Modernity, the Environment, and the Christian Just War Tradition
Following a survey of the biblical and classical background, Wisdom in Christian Tradition offers a detailed exploration of the theme of wisdom in patristic, Byzantine, and medieval theology up to and including Gregory Palamas and Thomas Aquinas in Greek East and Latin West, respectively. This journey is undertaken in conversation with modern Russian Sophiology, one of the most popular and widely discussed
An Epistemology of Religion and Gender: Biopolitics –Performativity – Agency
Ulrike Auga
In the spring of 2020, as the coronavi rus pandemic disrupted classrooms around the world, teachers scrambled to convert their lectures and pre sentations into a format more con ducive to online and distance learn ing. For Eugene Rogers, this meant transcribing as closely as possible the spoken lectures that have made his Introduction to Christian Thought course at UNC Greensboro, a course he has taught some forty times, justly famous. The result is this book: an insightful, winsome, and engaging introduction to the history of Christian thought by a teacher at the height of his craft. For Rogers, the history of Christian thought is the story of a language—"Christianese," if you will— that participants use to frame their agreements and their disagreements alike. Rogers introduces us to the most interesting speakers of Christianese and their importance, enabling us to both listen in on and take part in the living conversation about God’s activity in and for our world.
Mark Douglas
At least since the attacks of 9/11, religion has been met with suspicion. In this study, Ulrich Schmiedel investigates how political theologians in the UK and the US responded to the terror attacks. The friend-foe distinction, formulated by the German legal and political scholar Carl Schmitt, emerges as a core category in the controversy about liberal and post-liberal theories of religion, stirred up among defenders and despisers of the Global War on Terror. Building on Dorothee Sölle’s political theology, Schmiedel draws them into a conversation with Muslim scholars of religion. Ultimately, he develops the contours of a coalitional and comparative political theology for pluralist societies today.
Eugene Rogers
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Terror und Theologie: Der Diskursreligionstheoretischeder9/11-Dekade
Wisdom in TraditionChristian Marcus Plested
This book puts forward a new episte mological framework understanding the role of religion and gender in the public sphere. It provides a sophisticated un derstanding of gender and its relation to religion as a primarily performative cat egory of knowledge production, rooting that understanding in case studies from around the world. The book analyzes the interdependence of religion, gender, and neo-nationalisms, scrutinizing the biopolitical interferences of nation states and dominant political and religious institutions. It then moves on to uncover counter-discourses and spaces of activ ism and agency in contexts such as East Germany and the Occupy Wall Street movement. Using gender and queer theory in tandem with postcolonial and post-secular perspectives, readers are shown a more nuanced understanding of critical contemporary questions relat ed to religion, gender, and sexuality.
The latest books from our scholars, showcasing advanced research
movementstheologicalofourtime.CTIMember Books
Henriksen examines the po tential of the Christian tradition to develop symbols that can engage people in committed and sustained action to prevent further crisis. To do so, he argues that we need symbols that engage both intellectually and emotionally, and which enhance our perception of belonging in relationships with other humans, in the present and in the future.
In this volume, Mark Douglas pres ents an environmental history of the Christian just war tradition. Focusing on the transition from its late medi eval into its early modern form, he explores the role the tradition has played in conditioning modernity and generating modernity’s blind ness to interactions between the natural and the political. Douglas criticizes problematic myths that have driven conventional narratives about the history of the tradition and suggests a revised approach that better accounts for the evolution of that tradition through time. Along the way, he provides new interpreta tions of works by Francisco de Vito ria and Hugo Grotius, and, provoca tively, the Constitution of the United States of America. Sitting at the intersection of just war thinking, environmental history, and theolog ical ethics, Douglas’s book serves as a timely guide for responses to wars in a warming world as they increas ingly revolve around the flashpoints of religion, resources, and refugees.
Judith McCartin Scheide is a philanthropist, patron of the arts, and long-standing trustee of the Center of Theological Inquiry. In this interview she reflects with us on the original vision of the Center and why she faithfully supports the mission every year.
Throughout history, there has been a belief in a God or gods. This belief spans the centuries, crosses continents and oceans, and populations that do not have contact with one another. Why is this belief so prevalent? That is theology; the study of the question of God. Why do we believe? How does this profound belief affect how we act, react, and interact with the world around us?
he annual William H. Scheide Lec ture on Religion & Global Concern is given in memory of one of CTI’s founders, William H. Scheide, and addresses our mission to make a theological impact on global concerns. These are concerns not only of one discipline or religion, but of all disci plines and religions across the world.
What do you appreciate about a CTI lecture or program featuring our scholars and research?
J. Kameron Carter with CTI Trustee Judith McCartin Scheide
It is important that people know this special Center ex ists and we must spread our light for all to join us on our adventure of theological inquiry. My sincere hope is that CTI goes on for many years and I encourage ev eryone to join me in supporting this truly worthy cause.
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Black Studies and Black Religion for better ways of relating to our common home.
ctinquiry.org/support
I continue to be fascinated by the work of CTI. As our world changes, our understanding changes and theolo gy’s wisdom helps to inform how we live now.
A Professor of Religious Studies at the Univer sity of Indiana, J. Kameron Carter in his lec ture acknowledged William Scheide’s philan thropic vision and support: “I am grateful to be here and to learn of William Scheide’s great work philanthropically, his behind-the-scenes support in tangible ways in the development of civil rights in this country, the support of integration, and his allyship with Thurgood Marshall. To learn of him and then take in afresh the honor of the invitation to offer a lecture that is named after him, it is a privilege.”
The key theme Carter explored in his presentation is that to understand crises, we must embrace other ways of being and other ways of knowing. What is the world and how can we understand it? The world can be seen as a construct that we have placed upon the Earth, tempting us to see the Earth as some thing ownable. If the Earth is ownable, we be gin to think we can extract whatever we need from it. The doctrine of creation bears within itself an approach to knowing a “world” rath er than the “Earth.” Our current ecological crisis is rooted in this fundamental misunder standing of ownership. Carter argued in his lecture that we need a different orientation to the Earth, and he turned to the resources of
Taking place during CTI’s Research Workshop on Religion & the Natural Environment, Car ter’s lecture drew on insights from Black Studies to shed light on the ecological crisis. CTI’s first in-person public event since March 2020, this year’s William Scheide Lecture featured CTI’s distinctive approach to fresh thinking, where new ideas are brought to various contexts in un expected ways. As Carter demonstrated so well, the ecological crisis is a crisis of how we under stand the place of humanity in nature. The real challenge is to imagine creation otherwise.
What our scholars appreciate about CTI is our unique environment of interdisciplinary research. During their time at CTI, theologians and scholars are active ly engaging with each other and not isolated in silos.
Join the Adventure of Theological Inquiry by making a gift online and supporting our work
ogy in relationship with other disciplines in the human ities and natural sciences. We bring together theologians and experts in the field we are studying. For example, this year as we study the natural environment our research workshop is composed of theologians and experts in en vironmental studies and policy. At the end of the research term, they share with us what insights they have learned.
You have been involved with CTI for many years, at first through your late husband and one of the original founders, Bill Scheide, and now as a long-standing Trustee. What is it about CTI that keeps you interested?
Creation Otherwise
At CTI, we believe it is in the dialogue where we make our Bothdiscoveries.wordsinour name are critical. Inquiry is just as important as theology; it might be the key word in what we do. How we are structured and how we operate cre ate the opportunities for inquiry for our scholars and the wider public.
The wide range of concerns we study including racism, economic inequality, violence to name a few, affect all of humanity and I feel that it is our responsibility to inquire as much as we possibly can.
Why do you give to the Center of Theological Inquiry?
We are inquiring about religion and about the study of God in other cultures, which is so important through out the world. The founders of CTI understood how critical theology was to understanding what is happen ing in the world today.
William H. Scheide Lecture on Religion & Global Concerns
Professor J. Kameron Carter delivers CTI’s flagship public lecture, chaired by Rev. Darrell Armstrong, CTI Trustee
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To start our conversation, please share with us how you describe theology?
Nobody else does what we are doing. We are an indepen dent research center that gives intensive thought to theol
The founding vision was intentionally global. The Cen ter was founded in Princeton, New Jersey, but the ob jective was not to study only local religions, but across the United States and the entire globe. The Founders wanted to investigate what people believed and how people believed. I stand with them as I also believe theo logical inquiry is at the crux of almost every discussion that people and countries have with one another.
Why I Support CTI Join Me on an Adventure of Inquiry.Theological
CENTER OF THEOLOGICAL INQUIRY SeasonPODCAST5,Episode3 EXPLORING QUESTIONS OF GENDER, JUSTICE AND DESIGN with guest Elise Edwards
William Scheide Lecture on Religion & Global Concerns
Elise EdwardsHost Joshua Mauldin
Professor of Religious Studies Indiana University
PO Box 2072 Princeton, NJ 08543 Visit ctinquiry.org for the latest news and events. a research center where theology makes an impact on global concerns