November 10, 2022
With Philip Clayton
Online at 7:00pm EST
Hosted by the American Teilhard Association
If anything has been scientifically established, it’s anthropogenic climate change. As we learned this last summer, climate disruption means floods, droughts, and fires ― levels of social and economic disruption we could hardly have imagined a few decades ago. The result is eco-anxiety and a pervasive sense of hopelessness, especially in younger people. What resources are available in the Christian tradition for addressing these challenges? Perhaps there is no other contemporary topic where theology and the natural (and social) sciences come together in more profound and important ways ― and certainly none on which the fate of the world’s ecosystems more urgently depend. In sharing some thoughts for us to discuss together, I will propose a theology that truly incorporates ecology into the very heart of its method and conclusions ― incorporates them as fully as Scholastic theology incorporated medieval philosophy. We will discover some amazing (and fruitful) implications for understanding God and God’s relationship to the world. The result is genuinely “theology in a new key” ― not in an artificial sense, but in a, well, organic way. And, I dare say, it’s an approach to theology that genuinely can bring hope.