During the summer of 2020, the Wendland-Cook program hosted a series of webinars under the theme: Liberating People and Planet: Christian Responses at the Intersection of Economics, Ecology, and Religion. Originally planned as an in-person conference, these webinars featured insights from theologians and scholars of religion reflecting on our climate and economic crisis. The original papers are being prepared for a book to be released in 2021.
In preparation of the book release and to contextualize the webinars we’re featuring brief overviews of each of the chapters in this Interventions forum. To learn more about the Liberating People and Planet project, visit our webpage dedicated to the project, where you can view recordings of the webinars and learn more about our contributors.
Contributors: George Zachariah; Upolu Vaai; Dan Joranko; Joerg Rieger; Terra Schwerin Rowe; Jeremy Posadas; Timothy Eberhardt; Tim Van Meter; Sofia Betancourt
Moana Eco-theology: Towards an Eco-theology of Commoning
George Zachariah
Colonization of the commons is the colonization of the planet and the people, and commoning is the praxis that liberates the commons and the commoners.
Religion has played a major role in the colonization of the commons. But religion also has the potential to be a catalyst in the praxis of commoning. The environmental history of Oceania in general and Aotearoa New Zealand, in particular, exemplifies the history of the colonization of the commons perpetuated by settler colonialism, neo-liberal capitalism and institutional racism.
Moana Eco-theology, the creative eco-theological reflections from Oceania, problematizes mainstream eco-theologies and proposes alternative methodological standpoints to envision and initiate the liberation of the planet and the people.
In the paper to come, I reflect upon Moana Eco-theology from the commons perspective drawing from the ongoing struggles of the tangata whenua (people of the land) to liberate their moana and whenua.
George Zachariah serves the Trinity Methodist Theological College, Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand as lecturer in Theological Studies. He has also served the faculty of the United Theological College, Bangalore, India and the Gurukul Lutheran Theological College and Research Institute, Chennai, India. His publications include: Decolonizing Ecotheology: Indigenous and Subaltern Challenges (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, forthcoming, co-editor), The Life, Legacy and Theology of M.M. Thomas (New York: Routledge, 2016, co-editor with Monica Melanchthon) and Alternatives Unincorporated: Earth Ethics from the Grassroots (New York: Routledge, 2014).
A Dirtification of Economy from a Pacific Eco-Relational Perspective
Upolu Vaai
The Pacific region is overwhelmed by multiple layers of a destructive development narrative:
1.) The region is the first to feel the impact of the climate crisis;
2.) The most overexploited under the onefication economic model of the rich corporations;
3.) The pressure of the renewed colonial "Pacific rush” narrative accompanies the recent geopolitical interests on the region of the rich powerful nations;
4.) The neglect of the grassroots community spirituality in the narrative;
5.) And the new bush for sustainable development wrapped within the obscured promises of the ‘blue growth’ development paradigm.
The impact of all of these is first felt by the Pacific dirt communities daily.
In the dirt communities, dirt is not negative as profiled by conventional colonial thinking. Dirt is wholly part of Pacific identity and everyday economic life and wellbeing. Hence any economy that is not “down to dirt” and removed from the dirtified economic ways and interests of the communities is considered a digestive and a cleansing system of power.
Alongside the many efforts outside the church to challenge the dominant colonial development narrative, the recent shift led by the Pacific churches through the work of the Pacific Theological College and the Pacific Conference of Churches attempts to create a new Pacific Household story for development that is Pacific, ground-up, and informed by life-affirming worldviews and faith and indigenous spiritualities of the Pacific dirt communities.
Eco-relationality focuses on the de-onefication of economy and reframes development from the perspective of the multiple eco-relationships that are deeply connected to the dirt identity of the communities and are often ignored by the mainstream one-dimensional neoliberal economy. In this chapter, I see the Pacific eco-relational lens as fundamental to Pacific dirt identity and propose a much needed “dirtification of economy,” if we are to liberate and address the injustices imposed by the dominant economic systems on the grassroots communities.
Such a project brings in the much needed question of the place of God in solidarity with the dirt and the repositioning of human identity and responsibility in the story of development of the Pacific dirt communities.
Upolu Lumā Vaai is Professor of Theology and Ethics and Principal of the Pacific Theological College in Suva Fiji. He is a member of more than ten international research organisations and journals including the recently established Advisory Board of the Laudato Si’ Research Institute, University of Oxford. He is the Oceania chair of the Oxford Institute of Methodist Theological Studies. He is currently working on several articles, including three book projects: Indigenous Relational Philosophies of Oceania: Rewriting the Story of Development through Oceanic Wisdom (editor); Methodist Revolutions: Evangelical Engagements of Church and World (co-editor with Joerg Rieger); Eco-Relational Theology: Restorying God in the Pacific (author).
Engaging the Gandhian Tradition in Confronting the Climate Crisis
Dan Joranko
One of the central concerns of our day is the need to de-carbonize our economic life. The crisis is such is that if it is not successfully met we face the possibility of civilization spiraling into collapse or catastrophic war. The crisis is urgent; we have a decade or so to meet the challenge. At the same time, de-carbonization provides significant opportunities for a more just and sustainable future.
Until recently the U.S. Christian response has been muted. Much of the activity has focused on statements or small-scale work such as greening congregational buildings. At the same time — we are witnessing a growing and more robust climate movement, which has included participants from U.S. churches. This paper suggests considering an approach rooted in the Gandhian tradition of strategic nonviolence. It establishes a dialogue between Christian thought and action with the origins and evolution of this tradition. Most of the Christian examples come from the United States, but I hope this approach can provide one avenue towards a more international dialogue.
In the paper, I propose a fourfold framework:
a) pragmatic politics and organizing;
b) satyagraha and strategic nonviolence;
c) constructive work and community economic development; and
d) simple living and intentional community.
This framework, in turn, touches on the core dimensions of social life: governance and politics, institutions and social movements, economics and work, communities and households, and religion. Finally, I argue that that an embrace of the Gandhian tradition will be a force towards both overcoming the climate crisis and providing a pathway to a more just and sustainable flourishing of life on our precious planet.
Daniel Joranko is a Lecturer at the Vanderbilt Divinity School and teaches on subjects
such as religion and ecology, community development and strategic nonviolence. He
coordinates the VDS Riverbend program, which features courses inside prisons made up
of one-half VDS students and one-half prisoners. He also serves as the state coordinator
for Tennessee Interfaith Power and Light and the coordinator of the United Methodist
Tennessee Conference Creation Care Ministry. He is a long-time community organizer,
including work in Nashville and Chicago.
The Peculiar Agency of People and the Planet:
On the Need to Rethink Everything, Including Religion
Joerg Rieger
Climate change entails the diagnosis of a life-threatening condition. What is threatened, to be sure, is not the future of life on planet Earth but the future of human life as we know it, along with the life of many other species. Earth, myriads of bacteria, cockroaches, and perhaps even some humans who have the means for survival will likely be fine for the time being; the majority of humanity, hummingbirds, and koalas probably will not. Inequalities along the lines of race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, nationality, and class further exacerbate this scenario.
Not all is lost just yet, however. As we take a deeper look at the causes of our current condition, a better grasp of possible solutions emerges as well. Social movements and the agency emerging from the majority of humanity—those not benefiting from prevailing developments—have changed the world in the past and may well change it again, and neither should the agency of nature itself be dismissed out of hand. How would another look at problems and solutions impact the work of theologians, economists, and social and natural scientists?
Joerg Rieger is the Distinguished Professor of Theology, Cal Turner Chancellor’s Chair in Wesleyan Studies, and Founder and Director of the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice
“Energizing Human Development”: Humanity, Divinity, and the Climate Crisis
Terra Schwerin Rowe
In a 2016 Report to the United Nations Development Programme, ecological economist Julia K Steinberger emphasizes that most research and policy decisions aimed to mitigate climate change have focused on the concern that human well-being is tied to economic growth, which, in turn, is tied to high energy consumption. She argues that rather than focusing on the problem of economic growth, energy and its role in societal development and human well-being should be a primary focus of research and policy decisions. While Steinberger’s argument emphasizes the aim of human well-being, given her climate and sustainability concerns, it is evident that for her human well-being and ecological flourishing are intertwined.
As Steinberger’s work demonstrates, given the urgency of climate change, energy production and consumption emerges as an urgent focus for ecological economics. The same could be said for the study of religion. In her 2019 book, The Birth of Energy, political ecologist Cara New Daggett highlights the way Scottish Calvinism informed the 19th century emergence of the modern science of thermodynamics. She argues that the Protestant work ethic infused the modern redefinition of energy as an ability to do work. Consequently, Daggett suggests, in order to adequately address the current energy induced climate crisis, we need to decouple the concept of energy from its associations with work.
I agree with much of Daggett’s analysis of problematic theological influences on the way energy has been conceptualized in the West. However, I will argue that the problem is much more ancient than the Protestant work ethic. In the West, from Aristotle to the 19th century “discovery” of oil in America, theologians and philosophers have consistently aligned high heat/energy production and consumption with divinity, the full development of humanity in the form of a rational male, and the height and aims of civilization. Consequently, the more deeply rooted and pressing problem today is the decoupling of high energy from divinity and the highest values and aims of human fulfillment/development.
In her work, Steinberger challenges this consistent Western logic that high energy production and consumption invariably leads to high human development. Steinberger also identifies places in the world where low or moderate energy consumption habits are also high markers for human development and well-being. Given these findings, I argue that an unexplored, but urgent area of constructive theological exploration is in drawing on the rich religious resources of ritual, contemplation, certain modes of asceticism, and communal organizing that can foster the kinds of shifts in human values, aims, and habits that might decouple high energy civilization from human flourishing.
Terra Schwerin Rowe is Assistant Professor in the University of North Texas Philosophy and Religion Department. Her work focuses on critical and constructive engagements with Western religious traditions from the perspective of environmental and feminist concerns. Her first book, Toward a Better Worldliness: Economy, Ecology and the Protestant Tradition (2017) analyzes the Protestant ecological and economic implications of the Protestant articulation of grace as “free gift.” A current project, Of Modern Extraction: Gender, Religion, and Energy (forthcoming, 2022) focuses on the imbrication of gender and energy constructs (including oil narratives) in predominant Western religious and philosophical traditions.
Queer Reproductive Justice as Framework for Christian Anti-Capitalism
Jeremy Posadas
In this chapter, I argue that queer reproductive justice offers a conceptual foundation for constructing a Christian response to capitalism.
Reproductive justice is a normative framework first formulated a quarter-century ago by twelve Black women as a more comprehensive agenda for securing self-determination of all persons in matters of biological reproduction and family formation. Queer reproductive justice is the my own recent expanded formulation of reproductive justice so that it secures equity across the entire sphere of social reproduction (not only biological reproduction) and between the species Homo sapiens and the rest of the ecosphere.
After summarizing the core principles of queer reproductive justice, this chapter uses it as a lens for interpreting three central components of the Christian witness: Creation, the Christ-event, and the communio that constitutes the Body of Christ’s continuing earthly life. When these are understood through the lens of queer reproductive justice, it becomes evident how capitalism is intrinsically incompatible with the Christian proclamation, and hence that Christians are obligated to take up the long task of eradicating capitalism, not merely ameliorating it.
Jeremy Posadas is an associate professor of religious studies and core faculty member in gender studies at Austin College (on the rural Texas-Oklahoma border), where he holds the John F. Anderson Chair of Christian Thought. A queer-feminist social ethicist, he has written on anti-work theory, reproductive justice, and Christian rape culture and is currently writing an eco-queer ethics against capitalism. He is a member of the committee that oversees the largest gathering of religion scholars in the world and has twice been selected as a fellow of the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion.
Tri-Animist Economics: The Intimate Re-Enchantment of Creation for a Regenerative Eco-Socialism
Timothy Eberhart
The crucifixion of people and planet intrinsic to extractivist capitalism is based in the theo-logics of a hierarchically-ordered universe, which undergird and justify the commodification, exploitation, and disposal of human and more-than-human persons for the financial benefit of an elect few.
At a time when more and more are recognizing the urgent need to transition beyond capitalism to a more egalitarian, just, and life- sustaining political economy, theology’s contribution must include provoking a cosmological revolution that embraces the flourishing of all human beings within the broader flourishing web of all our relations, beginning with those most threatened by the present order.
This paper will argue for the particular significance of emerging Christian Animist perspectives in fostering the perspectival and affective changes needed to support the regenerative eco-socialist projects that are needed today.
Dr. Timothy R. Eberhart is Assistant Professor of Theology and Ecology at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, where he directs the MA in Public Ministry degree and oversees a concentration in Ecological Regeneration. He teaches in the areas of theology and ethics, concentrating on the relation of Christian doctrine to environmental, economic, political, and social change theory. His publications include Rooted and Grounded in Love: Holy Communion for the Whole Creation (Wipf and Stock, 2017), The Economy of Salvation: Essays in Honor of M. Douglas Meeks (Wipf and Stock, 2015), and chapters on mission, ecclesiology, and ecotheology.
distorted Imagination: Land, Food, and Economies
Tim Van Meter
Each day, people participate in small decisions carrying long term global impact. Contemporary moral statements about the right way to eat or ethics of plant based diets are promoted as ways to make moral judgements that can ‘save the world.’ However, many of these decisions place a moral and economic burden on others while ceding food production and distribution to industrial systems. Recent examples include the significant, and well placed, outrage at the vulnerability of workers in the meatpacking industry, such as chicken and pork processing plants in the Midwest during the pandemic tying their working conditions to meat in a person’s diet. I’m in agreement that industrial agriculture as seen in meat processing and centralized animal feeding operations (CAFOs) are places of exploitation of workers. The Immokalee workers and other collectives of vegetable harvesters were calling out for review of their spaces of injustice with as high or higher rates of COVID infection but their calls may not have been amplified with the same vigor. At the same time, workers for a vegan food company were fighting for the right to organize in the face of company union busting.
All of these examples are evidence of the oppressive values at the heart of our industrial food system. However, there might be better, less heroic, ways to join in solidarity for food security and sovereignty through cooperative models. In this paper, I assert that choices in our diets should be allied with commitments to human and animal labor in small local farms and cooperatives offering the greatest health for people, animals, soil, and shared vocation.
Dr. Tim Van Meter is an Associate Professor at the Methodist Theological School in Ohio
(MTSO) where he leads ecology and justice specializations in the M.Div. MAPT, D.Min, and co-
directs the new Master of Arts in Social Justice (MASJ). He also serves as the Coordinator of
Ecological Initiatives, leading work on food security, community responses to climate change,
agroecological theology, and social justice. His research interests include: how ecology is taught
in theological schools, ecological practices of faith communities, and farmers’ understandings of
the sacred in relationship to land and vocation.
Unearthed: Ecowomanism and Economies of Disposability
Sofia Betancourt
In this chapter, I draw my framework from Natasha Trethewey’s rending poem, “Miracle of the Black Leg.” My argument questions religiously sanctioned violence against supposedly disposable bodies in the face of climate disruption.
“Unearthed” calls for ecowomanist analyses that engage Kathryn Yusoff’s understanding of the color line of the Anthropocene as a silencing of multiple human extinction level events caused by settler colonialism and chattel slavery. The economic impacts and realities of so-called disposable communities, those sacrificed as false cure as well as those silenced as (im)material witnesses to environmental devastation, require reconsideration of the questions raised at the intersections of religion, economics, and ecology.
Truly practical approaches to planetary flourishing must engage the legacies and lived realities of the ecological other.
Rev. Sofia Betancourt is a Ph.D. Candidate at Yale University in the departments of Religious
Ethics and African American Studies. Her work focuses on environmental ethics of liberation in
a womanist and Latina feminist frame. She served for four years as the Director of Racial and
Ethnic Concerns of the Unitarian Universalist Association, and her ministry centers on work that
is empowering and counter-oppressive. Betancourt holds a B.S. from Cornell University with a
concentration in ethnobotany, an M.A. and M.Phil from Yale University in religious ethics and
African American studies, and an M.Div. from Starr King School for the Ministry.