This Fall and Winter The BTS Center in Portland, Maine will be holding an online program titled “Navigating Climate Spiritual Care: A Learning Community for chaplains, pastors, educators, lay leaders, and spiritual seekers.” The program runs from October to March, and meetings are held twice a month. The deadline for applications is September 15.
From the BTS site:
Spiritual care in this time of climate change — with so many social, emotional, and spiritual consequences resulting from such instability — is both deeply necessary and, in many ways, uncharted territory. As chaplains, preachers, pastors, lay leaders, and spiritual seekers who are unaffiliated religiously, we hold resources from our own traditions and our own spiritual formation that can help us face the climate emergency. Yet those resources can feel difficult to access or utilize when so much is unknown.
The BTS Center is pleased to offer this learning community, originally developed in an asynchronous format by our friends Jessica Morthorpe and Blair Nelsen, and offered by our partner Waterspirit. We will engage Waterspirit’s materials together as a learning community, guided by two hosts and facilitators, meeting twice each month to deepen our understanding of the physical, emotional, mental health, and spiritual impacts of the climate crisis, and to explore how to address these impacts through the practice of spiritual care. In this learning community, participants will explore a range of resources for addressing the climate crisis within their chosen vocations. Together we will navigate this landscape by drawing on already-established spiritual care skills and wisdom that we bring to this work as practitioners, and which can reassure us of our preparedness for the challenge.
The program hosts are The Rev. Alison Cornish, Coordinator of the Chaplaincy Initiative at the BTS Center and Nicholas Collura, director of the Radius program for ethical reflection on technology and culture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he also serves as a campus chaplain.
The topics that this course will cover are quite timely and much needed for many of the challenges we are experiencing today. They include:
- climate anxiety and grief
- race-conscious spiritual care
- care to peoples of the land
- natural disaster and climate migrants
- ministry to climate activists and climate-anxious people
- spiritual care to children
- contextualizing self-care and self-differentiation
- responding to climate denial and eco-phobic theologies
- complicated hope
Read more about eco-chaplaincy in this article from Sojourners.
The cost for the 5 month program is $200. Find out more about the program here, and if interested, apply here by September 15.