Blog
Welcome to the new Yale Forum Blog!
We will be sharing a variety of original content including interviews, reviews, reports from the field, new and enhanced resources on the Forum website, content from our new video podcast series, FORE Spotlights, and much more.
Check back every Tuesday and Thursday for new content.
In honor of Mother's Day, as well as the passing of James Lovelock last year, we wanted to take a few moments to reflect on the concept of Gaia, Mother Earth.
Gaia (or Gaea) was the Greek goddess of Earth–the ancestral, elemental mother to all life on our planet. But the idea of Earth as Mother exists in many traditions around the world, in the form of Pachamama, Spider Grandmother,...
Tomorrow is Vesak, the Buddhist celebration of the Buddha's birth, death, and enlightenment. And today is the National Day of Prayer in the United States. In honor of the conjunction of these two holidays, we'd like take this opportunity to share a couple of Buddhist prayers and reflections concerning nature and the environment. If you have a favorite Buddhist prayer that speaks to the preservation and restoration of our natural world, we welcome you to share it here on our...
This episode of Spotlights features Joerg Rieger, PhD, Distinguished Professor of Theology and the Cal Turner Chancellor’s Chair of Wesleyan Studies at Vanderbilt University. He is also the founding director of the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice. We discuss his latest book, Theology in the Capitalocene: Ecology, Identity, Class, and Solidarity (Fortress Press, 2022), which explores the implications of the Anthropocene through theological inquiries into ecology, labor, capitalism, and intersectionality....
Arbor Day is tomorrow, so we wanted to share with you some tree-related resources to enhance your celebration of the trees and forests that give so much to us all year round.
First, we wanted to share again the recordings of the three online events that were held last year to celebrate the release of Orion Magazine's anniversary anthology Old Growth. Every one contains abundant gems of...
In keeping with our theme for 2023, this Earth Day we'd like to share with you Seeds of Hope: how nature inspires scientists to confront climate change.
On Earth Day last year, the Washington Post published this series of brief reflections by climate scientists and conservationists about what keeps them going and inspires them to do the work they do, even when the overall picture feels bleak. These offerings come from across the globe by environmentalists and researchers from places such as ...
This episode of Spotlights features Gopal D. Patel, a faith-based environmental activist, campaigner, and consultant. He is co-Founder and Director of Bhumi Global, an international Hindu faith-inspired NGO that works to promote environmental care. He is also a senior advisor for the Center for Earth Ethics, co-chair of the United Nations Multi-faith Advisory Council, and an advisor to the World Wildlife Fund Beliefs and Values Programme. We discuss his personal experience of Hinduism, his background with multi-faith dialogue, and the...
Today, we have a guest post by Charlie Bartlett and Iyad Abu Moghli of the UNEP Faith for Earth Coalition on the activity surrounding, and actions coming out, of the recent UN 2023 Water Conference. For more information about their work, see the links in the story or go to the Faith for Earth site. Please also see the list of additional resources at the end.
Faith organizations are already engaged in water action, but can they do more?
Humanity is facing...
Tomorrow is Good Friday—the time of profound grief—and Easter will arrive soon after, bringing the uplifting energy of celebration and renewal.
As a child, many of my peers detested Good Friday, finding it dark, depressing, demoralizing. They dreaded it and just wanted to rush past it to Easter Sunday, open their baskets of candy, don their new dresses and hats for church, and leave all of that gloom behind. But I waited eagerly for it every year, as it was the only day we were allowed to...
This episode of Spotlights features Barbara Mahany, a freelance journalist, essayist, collector of stories, and author of five books. She discusses her latest book, The Book of Nature: The Astonishing Beauty of God’s First Sacred Text (Broadleaf Books, 2023). We talk about the myriad ways of reading the natural world and discovering its sacredness through practices of attention, including perspectives from religions, poetry, nature writing, and sciences.
More information can be found on the publisher's website: https://...
Today, we're pleased to feature a new book by Kathleen Deignan CND and Libby Osgood CND: Teilhard De Chardin: A Book of Hours from Orbis Books. The publisher states: “This Book of Hours is divided into eight days, and further subdivided into Dawn, Day, Dusk, and Dark. The first seven days follow weekly evolutionary themes and conclude with an eighth day, “Tomorrow,” to honor Teilhard’s vision of the future.” You can read a sample of the book or view the table of contents....