The Walk Along Prospect Street

By Gavin Guerrette
Yale News
May 31, 2022

Most joint degrees offered at Yale and elsewhere are considered practical with respect to professional applicability. But there is one School of the Environment and Divinity School joint degree program which does not at first glance appear to be as practical as its counterparts: the joint degree in religion and ecology. Professors John Grim and Mary Evelyn Tucker, jointly appointed senior lecturers and research scholars at the School of the Environment have championed the necessity of the degree. Science and policy are necessary, they said, but not entirely sufficient, in addressing the environmental crises we face today. From their view, the incorporation of religious and ethical frameworks is crucial to understanding and appealing to the factors that motivate substantive change. Tucker and Grim have spent much of their careers expanding this field of interdisciplinary scholarship as the co-founders and directors of the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology, a forum that hosts conferences and publishes research from a range of religious and environmental scholarship which has been based at Yale since 2006.

Yale is one of the only universities in the country to offer a degree program of this kind and as such serves as the center for activism and scholarship rooted in the relationship between religion and ecology.

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