Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology is Coming to YCEJ!
Yale Center for Environmental Justice Newsletter
May 10, 2023
The Yale Center for Environmental Justice is pleased to announce that Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim will be affiliated faculty at the Center. The Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology that they founded will be housed with YCEJ starting this summer. The Yale Forum arose out of a series of 10 conferences and books they organized at Harvard’s Center for the Study of World Religions that explored the ecological and justice dimensions of the world’s religions.
Environmental justice has early roots in religious communities in North America and now there are EJ offices in many of the religious traditions around the world. Tucker and Grim have edited a series of 28 books on Ecology and Justice. This includes Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor by Leonardo Boff, which was a major influence on the eco-justice encyclical letter of Pope Francis, Laudato Si.
The Forum on Religion and Ecology was launched at conferences at the United Nations and the American Museum of Natural History in 1998. In 2006 then Dean Gus Speth invited them to teach at Yale School of the Environment in the joint program in religion and ecology with the Divinity school.
Drawing on their expertise, which they developed over 40 years, they created six online Coursera classes in Religions of the World and Ecology. They also created a multi-media project, Journey of the Universe. This consists of an Emmy Award winning film, a book from Yale University Press, a series of podcasts, and three online Coursera courses.