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 this week’s episode of Spotlights, Sam Mickey welcomes Kimberly Carfore, PhD, to the podcast. She is an environmental studies professor at the University of San Francisco and a steering committee member for the Religion and Ecology unit of the American Academy of Religion. Together they reflect on the first week of AAR’s virtual meeting, which began November 30th and will conclude later this week on December 10. Their discussion focuses specifically on ecologically panels happening at the conference, including...
Welcome to December and the closing weeks of what has been quite a rollercoaster of a year for our world. We wanted to highlight a few of the many upcoming events related to the field this month. These events are not organized by the Forum, so if you have questions about them, please contact the organizers of each individual event. All of the following events are virtual and online, due to the continuing global pandemic.
November 29-December 10
Virtual AAR Annual Meeting 2020
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This week’s episode of Spotlights is all about the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion (AAR), which is taking place virtually this year from November 30 to December 10. Our host (Sam Mickey) discusses the importance of the AAR for scholars of theology and religion, with specific attention to the AAR groups that focus on issues related to ecology, including the Religion and Ecology group as well as groups on Animals and Religion, Religion and Food, and Space, Place, and Religion.
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This week’s episode of Spotlights features Whitney Bauman, PhD, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Florida International University, and co-founder and co-director of the nonprofit research center, Counterpoint: Navigating Knowledge.
Whitney discusses the personal and professional influences that shape his engagement with religion and ecology, and he talks about some ideas from his recent work, like uncertainty, wicked problems, Critical Planetary Romanticism (CPR), and the interruption of the chronological...
From November 29-December 10, 2020, the American Academy of Religion will hold its first-ever virtual annual meeting, in response to the CoVid crisis. To help you prepare for this online event, we’ve pulled together a list of sessions of interest to those in the field of Religion and Ecology. If the entire session is of interest, we’ve provided only the general information. If there is just an individual paper in the session that is of interest, we’ve listed the paper author and title. Sessions which...
This week’s episode features Andreas Karelas, executive director of RE-volv — a nonprofit organization that empowers communities to invest in solar energy — and author of the new book, Climate Courage: How Tackling Climate Change Can Build Community, Transform the Economy, and Bridge the Political Divide in America (Beacon Press, 2020). Andreas discusses community-oriented solutions to climate change, including the role of wisdom traditions, faith communities, and virtues of courage, simplicity, and gratitude. He’ll be...
This year finally saw some hope in the fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline and Energy Transfer Partners (the company who owns the controlling interest in DAPL).
Here’s brief recap of the history of the fight against the pipeline. In early 2016, construction permits for the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) were approved, which would allow it to go right through Sioux lands and directly under Lake Oahe, whose shores are home to the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation and the...
This week’s episode of Spotlights features Chris Ives, professor of religious studies at Stonehill College in Massachusetts. He discusses his work with Zen Buddhism, ethics, and ecology, including teaching and writing as well as practice and activism. His latest book, Zen on the Trail, draws on his personal experiences with hiking and backpacking to describe the meditative power of walking and the spiritual significance of pilgrimage. You can find more information here: https://zenonthetrail.com
You can watch the...
For the empowerment and enfranchisement of people everywhere, inclusivity is crucial, including inclusivity with regard to different ways of knowing and different ways of being in the world. This is a key factor in the book, Living Earth Community: Multiple Ways of Being and Knowing, edited by myself (Sam Mickey) along with Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim.
The book emerged from a unique workshop that took place at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation in Virginia in October of 2018, hosted by the renowned botanist and evolutionary plant scientist Peter Crane and organized by Mary Evelyn...
This week’s episode of Spotlights features Mitchell Thomashow, renowned educator and author, with a brand new book coming out this week, To Know the World: A New Vision for Environmental Learning (MIT Press, 2020). The discussion covers some of the main themes and topics of the book, including the Anthropocene, memory, interdisciplinary thinking, improvisation, adaptive and perennial learning, and cosmopolitan bioregionalism.
You can watch a vide of the interview below, or you can listen to it (audio-only) HERE.
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