On September 19-20, the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University and the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies (OCIS) will be holding a roundtable on Faith and Climate Change in Boston. Though the event is not open to the public, we wanted to share the information and make you aware of this exciting and important gathering. This is the second roundtable on these topics this year; the first was held in England this past May.
From the event brochure:
Climate change is an urgent – possibly existential – challenge to continued human flourishing on this planet. Clearly, it is a defining challenge to our longer-range future as a species. So much so that it might be difficult today to respond to that most important spiritual question – ‘What is a good life?’ – without reference to some discussion of environmental values and ecological virtue, and particularly to climate change. Yet, the climate policy discourse is nearly entirely in the language of science and economics with little effort to link these to the moral dimensions of human values and behavior. The Pardee Center for the Longer-Range Future at Boston University and the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies (OCIS) the are collaborating in a future-oriented, interdisciplinary, and structured research initiative to explore the moral dimensions of climate action and the possible role of faith-based values in encouraging positive environmental and climate behaviors – particularly in the context of Islam and Muslim societies. As part of this initiative, we are organizing two roundtables to explore the dimensions of a possible research agenda on faith and climate change, particularly in the context of Islam and Muslim societies.
Our own Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim will be speaking, and there are a number of other faces among the participants who may be familiar to Forum followers, including:
- Ibrahim Ozdemir: a speaker at our Islam and Ecology conference, a contributor to the resulting volume in the Religions of the World and Ecology series, and a member of our Advisory Group.
- Munjed Murad: a graduate of the Yale School of the
- Environment and a member of our Advisory Group. See him speak at this Harvard Divinity event.
- Russell Powell: a graduate of the Yale School of the Environment and a member of our Advisory Group. See this interview with him from our Spotlights podcast.
You can read much more about the event, all of the speakers, and the roundtable objectives here.