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.
The fourth season of the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology podcast, Spotlights, launched on August 21, 2023. Our host Sam Mickey has many exciting guests in store for us this year, so check back every other Monday for a new installment.
There are many ways to watch or listen to the podcast. You can find a running playlist of videos on our YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfoNnUIQBvM2DfHmBp5_X4NFfaI6Yss4S
You can also listen to these episodes by going here or searching for us on...
This past Sunday, Pope Francis said a mass during his trip to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. And in that mass, Francis quoted fellow Jesuit priest, philosopher, and scientist Teilhard de Chardin: “Radiant Word, blazing Power, you who mold the manifold so as to breathe life into it, I pray you, lay on us those your hands—powerful, considerate, omnipresent.” This quote...
The Vatican announced this week that Pope Francis will be releasing another encyclical on the environment on October 4, the Feast of St. Francis. This new papal letter—what some news outlets are calling Laudato Si' Part II or Laudato Si' 2.0—is exciting news, indeed. With the increasing challenges of our planet's climate emergency, and so many major weather events this year impacting so many around the world, this encyclical is very timely and much needed. Here are a few recent news stories...
As I reported last week, the RITA Summit was a rich and varied buffet of mental health professionals, scholars, activists, and more all coming together to address the issues of eco-anxiety and climate grief and how we find the strength to do this work and live in this increasingly challenging world.
The event sparked much Hope in many who attended. And yet, I was also quite surprised by the final panel’s responses to moderator Mary Evelyn Tucker’s...
As we've reported here in the blog and on our social media channels, last week was the RITA (Resilience in the Anthropocene) Summit hosted by the Loka Inititative at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. This gathering brought together activists, scholars, environmentalists, mental health practitioners, and more to discuss the growing crisis of climate/eco-anxiety and grief and globally mounting solastalgia and how we can transform and transmute this personally, in our communities, and as a planetary whole. This review is greater in...
Today we'd like to make our readers aware of a new page on our website. As part of our eco-anxiety section, we've just added an “SOS” page of quick practices to help when one is experiencing eco-anxiety and grief in the moment. We at the Forum are always working to find resources to share with you that will help support the field and the wider environmental community. And one of the primary areas of need in the last few years has been in this area of fear and despair brought on by our increasingly unpredictable climate and its...
Today, we'd like to uplift the new issue of Kosmos Journal, and particularly the theme of this issue–the gift of grief. In our quest for Hope, we often eschew and run from grief, sadness, mourning, and longing. But the articles in this issue provide a window into the transformation that can happen if we allow ourselves to fully feel it all, instead of resisting and running away. Meaning, elevated consciousness, and yes, even Hope can be found in those depths.
From the editor's introduction:
Can we humans also learn to spin gold...
This August, the Loka Initiative at University of Wisconsin Madison will be hosting The RITA (Resilience in the Anthropocene) Summit, a 3-day online event to support individuals and communities struggling with eco-anxiety and grief.
The summit offers a wide variety of speakers and panelists. Forum readers will be familiar with Mary Evelyn Tucker, Bobbi Patterson, and Fletcher Harper, but there are also many BIPOC speakers bringing new perspectives into the conversation. Keynotes will be delivered by Richard Davidson, founder and chair...
This episode of Spotlights features Freya Mathews, PhD, Emeritus Professor of Environmental Philosophy at Latrobe University, and author of several books, including The Ecological Self (1991, reissued with new intro in 2021), For Love of Matter: A Contemporary Panpsychism (2003), Reinhabiting Reality: Towards a Recovery of Culture (2005), and her new book, The Dao of Civilization: a Letter to China (2023). We discuss her personal and professional path toward metaphysics, conservation ethics, and ecological civilization, with special attention to the unique...
My town is starting to pick up the pieces. 2023 hasn't been the easiest year here in north-central Vermont. Winter fought to stay around even harder than usual, snowing on and off into May. The frogs emerged and began to mate, but the ice and snow returned and killed many of them and their offspring. Then the rains began–crops and gardens struggled to grow with abundant water and little sun, and then the waves of toxic wildfire smoke arrived.
And then last week...