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.
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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...
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...
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...
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...
Last week marked both the Birth of the Báb (also known as “The Gate”) and the Birth of Bahá'u'lláh, two major days in the Baha'i calendar. In honor of these Baha’i holy days, we wanted to highlight some of the resources in the Baha’i Faith section of the Forum site.
One of the more recent additions to the site, our Baha’i section offers a variety of ways to learn about and engage with the intersection of the Baha’i Faith and ecology. The Overview Essay, “Baha...
This week's episode of Spotlights features Tara Trapani, the chief administrator for the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology. She talks about her work with the Forum on Religion and Ecology, including some exciting, new projects happening there, especially the freshly redesigned website. She leads us through the website, navigating the abundance and diversity of news, events, bibliographies, multimedia resources, and so much more. You can check out the website for yourself: https://fore....