Belonging to the World By John Thatamanil Countless are the passages in Christian scripture which suggest that Christians ought not to regard this world as their true home. Cultivating a sense of belonging to the world has almost never been an explicit goal of classical Christian teaching. Christians are not Read more
Why We Need Greener Cities By Dorin David If someone offers you a glass of dirty water, obviously you don’t drink it. Maybe after walking thirsty in a dessert for a couple of days, but even then you’d probably not drink it, you’d only get your lips wet. So why Read more
A Monarch Jeremiad By Lisa H. Sideris “Most of all, I shall remember the monarchs.” —Rachel Carson, letter to Dorothy Freeman, September 10, 1963 In the summer of 2021, my family bid farewell to our longtime home in Indiana. We gathered clothing and provisions sufficient to last us several days Read more
The Strangeness of the Planetary Future By Whitney A. Bauman Wicked problems call for puzzling solutions. Wicked, here, is of course not the slang skater/surfer/stoner complement when something is amazing. Rather, it is a technical term that identifies what the nature of problems that result from the complex situations, and Read more
Celebrating Five Years of Counterpoint: Navigating Knowledge By Whitney A. Bauman and Kocku von Stuckrad If we want to address the major challenges of the 21st century—first and foremost climate disasters, human and other-than-human interdependencies on a global scale, as well as issues of social justice—concerted action is needed to Read more
The Role of Fictional Thinking in Climate Grief By Tamar Brandsma Climate change is one of the biggest problems of our era. We are facing natural losses at an accelerating pace: extraordinary species are under threat and land is disappearing because of rising sea levels and global warming. Climate change Read more
Rosemary Radford Ruether: A Prophet of the Planetary By Whitney A. Bauman At a recent meeting of the American Academy of Religion, there was much sharing of memories about prominent scholars in religious studies who passed away in 2021 and 2022, including my mentor, Rosemary Radford Ruether. Ruether was an Read more
On Environmental Grief By Kocku von Stuckrad Last week, yet another devastating report about the ecological state of the planet was published: WWF and Zoological Society of London’s biennial Living Planet Report. It confirms (again) that the abundance of birds, fish, amphibians, and reptiles is in freefall, plummeting by 69% Read more
The New Arms Race and the Approaching Climate Havoc: A Tipping Point for Humanity By Fabian Scheidler A few days after the Russian attack on Ukraine, a new report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was released, making it unmistakably clear that the Earth is on the Read more
Decolonizing for the Planetary Community: Many Worlds, One Planet By Whitney A. Bauman Sylvia Wynter has argued, I think successfully, that the idea of the human and subsequently what the “Humanities” are, grew out of a colonial context. The human was made in the image of the European, western, white Read more