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.
This episode of Spotlights features Dr. Sarah Pike, professor in the Comparative Religion and Humanities Department at California State University, Chico. She discusses her ethnographic and historical research at the intersection of religion and ecology, particularly with regard to New Age and Neopagan communities. She also talks about her most recent book, For the Wild: Ritual and Commitment in Radical Eco-Activism. Since this is our winter solstice episode, she provides us with some reflections on this seasonal event. You can find more...
The 4th Annual Flaring Forth Celebration, organized and hosted by Thomas Spiritbringer, was held November 9, 2020. The previous three celebrations were held at Holy Names University in Oakland, California, but this year it was held online due to the pandemic. The virtual format created an opportunity to gather with people from around the world. We celebrated three anniversaries: Thomas Berry’s birth anniversary in 1914, The Universe Story publication in 1992, and The Universe Story Calendar...
This week's episode of the FORE podcast features Jacob Erickson, PhD, Assistant Professor of Theological Ethics in the School of Religion at Trinity College Dublin. He introduces some of his work with theopoetics and queer ecology, and he shares some reflections on this year's virtual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, talking about some ways that nature, cosmology, ecology, bodies, and affect showed up in various panels and in the virtual media ecosystem of the conference itself. You can learn more about his...
As 2020 draws to a close, we wanted to take a look back and shine a spotlight on a few of the many wonderful volumes that have come out in the field this year. To go to the publisher's page for any book, just click on the title. Further resources for exploration have also been provided, when available. Titles are arranged chronologically.
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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,...
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...
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 appear to...
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...