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 Larry Rasmussen, PhD, Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics, emeritus, at Union Theological Seminary. He discusses his new book, The Planet You Inherit: Letters to My Grandchildren When Uncertainty's a Sure Thing. The book is composed of a series of letters that he wrote for his grandchildren. The letters talk about the uncertain future that his grandchildren will live through, including the myriad challenges facing the Earth community during the Anthropocene, not least of which is the ongoing task of understanding the...
Often in discussions about Hope, a counter argument will be presented (such as this one in Orion Magazine by Derek Jensen), which states that Hope is a bad thing that brings us down, something that keeps us striving and desperate, but never reaching those goals and aspirations—always grasping.
Though I can hear some of these arguments and see the danger they're trying to highlight, it has never resonated—anything can be misused by humanity, including Hope, but that doesn...
As Valentines Day approaches, with so many reminders in the media and surrounding culture, my thoughts naturally, organically turn to love. And when I hold the energy of love in my heart, one name sings out: Thich Nhat Hanh. Almost everything he wrote encompassed and integrated the idea and energy of love. But he had no less than seven titles specifically on the topic, including the 2013 volume, Love Letter to the Earth.
Our Valentine to you is an...
This episode of Spotlights features Amber X. Chen, a freelance journalist from Southern California whose work focuses on environmental justice. She contributed to several publications, including the climate and culture magazine Atmos, where she recently wrote a piece about the relationship between psychedelics, climate change, and environmental justice, “Tripping for the Planet: Psychedelics and Climate Change.” She discusses the problems and promises that psychedelics hold for the climate action toolkit, noting the particular importance of...
The Spring Creek Project at Oregon State University has just released a new podcast series titled Inner Nature. Each episode will be a rich conversation between two figures in the environmental field, focusing on inner work and practices that will help us hope, strength, energy, and spiritual fortitude for the work ahead.
From their site:
The Inner Nature podcast series is a collection of conversations between thought-leaders exploring the intersection of...
For those located in the colder areas of the Northern Hemisphere, this stretch of time—after the new year and before the return of the green and growth—can be one of the hardest in which to find a glimmer of hope. Here in Vermont, the skiers revel, but the remainder of us are more than ready for tiny green shoots and the cacophony of peepers as living full-color proof that death leads to life–regeneration is all around us. We crawl up out of the safe, warm mud where we've hidden...
Krista Tippett, the host of the NPR show, On Being, has much to say on the subject of hope and despair, often closing interviews by asking her guests what causes their despair and what brings them hope. We want to share a few offerings from her today, as part of our 2023 blog theme of Hope.
In 2021, she did a series on hope on her radio program titled The Future of Hope. Instead of interviewing guests in her usual format, she invited past guests to interview and converse with each other on this subject,...
This episode of Spotlights features Michael S. Northcott, PhD, Professor Emeritus of Ethics at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. He talks about his new book, God and Gaia: Science, Religion and Ethics on a Living Planet (Routledge, 2023), which explores the overlap between traditional religious cosmologies and the scientific Gaia theory of James Lovelock. The book engages with traditional cosmologies from the Indian Vedas and classical Greece to Medieval Christianity, including case material from Southeast Asia, Southern Africa, and...
Joyous 2023 to all of our readers and followers.
This year we'll be giving over a couple of posts a month to our theme for the year: Hope.
Eco-anxiety, grief, climate despair run rampant today. The news media only deepens this and often takes us to even darker places, as it demonstrates in full color the worst of our world.
Though awareness of these developments in the outer world is crucially important, we often...
Before we launch into 2023 tackling and talking about the environmental issues that our world is facing, we wanted to offer a spark of hope to begin this fresh, new year.
This is not in any way ignoring the difficulties we still face or the challenges ahead of us. But to face these challenges we need a foundation of hope–solid ground on which to stand as we strive to do the great work in the service of the Earth community.
Eco-anxiety, eco-grief, and Climate grief are running rampant...