What Use is Religion in a Climate Crisis? Thomas Merton and Environmental Justice.

Event description: 

January 14, 2022

Online at 1:00pm PST

Supported by the Charles S. Casassa SJ Chair, Dr. Alda Balthrop-Lewis will be giving a lecture on Friday, January 14 at 1:00pm PST. In accordance with Loyola Marymount University policy, the event will be on Zoom. The title of the talk is “What Use is Religion in a Climate Crisis? Thomas Merton and Environmental Justice.”

Click here to join this Zoom meeting.

Dr. Balthrop-Lewis is a Research Fellow in the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry at Australian Catholic University. Her research focuses on religious environmental ethics and the circulation of ideas among theological, artistic, and popular idioms. Her first book, Thoreau’s Religion: Walden Woods, Social Justice, and the Politics of Asceticism (Cambridge University Press, 2021), treats Henry David Thoreau as an inheritor of traditional ascetic practices, and argues that his asceticism is politically relevant—both in his period and for contemporary environmental ethics. Thoreau’s Religion was lauded by Cornel West as “the best treatment of Thoreau in this generation,” and by Kathryn Tanner as a “groundbreaking achievement.” Prof. Balthorp-Lewis’s current project is about Thomas Merton as an inheritor of ‘Thoreau's religion,’ in conversation with the politics of the 1960s and authors like Hannah Arendt, William Melvin Kelley, James Baldwin, and Rachel Carson.

The above image is by The Merton Center: http://www.mertoncenter.org/Poetry/griffin.jpg, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18293738