Religion and the Climate Crisis

This course examines the work of religious ideas—and ideas about religion—in creating, mediating, and responding to climate change. We will use religion as a lens for examining the role of humans in creating ecological destruction and efforts to repair and rework relationships with the natural world. The course draws on primary texts from and literature about a wide range of religious traditions in a bid to unsettle universalist narratives about both the environment and climate change. Students will encounter a variety of religious philosophies of the environment and interrogate the role that shifting ideas about religion have played in the emergence of the climate crisis. Throughout the course, questions of colonialism will be central in understanding how we think about religion and cultivating attitudes toward the environment. By the end of the semester, students will have deepened and nuanced their understandings of the notoriously vexed category of religion and come away with new ways of thinking about the climate crisis. Overall, this course will provide a strong grounding in both the study of religion and the environmental humanities.