The future of our planet and our spiritual institutions lies in the hands of the students of today. As we plan this conference, we bring together our hearts and minds to work together towards a common goal: bringing the environmental crisis to the attention of our faith-based institutions. Whether or not this task is accomplished will be based largely on the efforts of students young church leaders, such as our very own Frederica (Freddie) Ghesquiere. It is upon their backs that the groundbreaking work of current scholars and church-leaders will be carried.
Freddie, a first year student at Yale Divinity School is quickly becoming a leader in the greening of our school. A self-described Christian Quaker, a returned Peace Corps Volunteer, and a member of the Yale Committe on Social Justice (YCSJ) and the Yale Earth Care Commitee (YECC), Freddie has devoted herself to making her world a better place for others. While she has no specific career goals in mind, she is considering a future in faith-based overseas development focusing on resource management or NGO work in ecotheology here in the United States.
Please enjoy this excerpt from her Senior Thesis:
Conversations with Scott Stokoe, a philosopher, counselor, teacher, and the director of Dartmouth's organic farm, inspired my fierce scribbling about humans' relationship with nature as we transplanted tomatoes one summer during college. Scott helped me see that we live in a society separated from the earth. Introductions to environmental texts do not often address this human separation from nature. Instead, alaming statistics typically persuade the reader that something is not quite right outside our climate-controlled homes and offices. From my studies of the environment I accept as a given that we are in the midst of a crisis. Our species is altering the natural systems of the earth at an unprecedented rate. Many express alarm, but few search for the ultimate cause in the place I consider most likely to harbor some answers: religion.
When I explain to someone that I was both a religion and environmental studies major in college I am often met by a furrowed brow and the inevitable inquiry: What do those have to do with each other? Initially I might have answered that I was passionate about both, but soon I began to say with confidence that they are inextricably linked. Religion has a great deal to say about nature, and the way we treat nature has a great deal to do with the predominate religion in our society. In America, institutional Christianity has ignored the issue of the environment up until a few decades ago, and even then responded with lukewarm interest. Christianity is perceived as a religion about people. Through the historical act of a man, it claims to redeem all humans and strives to spread this message to all people. After all, no one is out to convert pine trees. It was not until a historian of medieval technology published an essay in the late sixties that a connection was forged between the ancient tradition and the emerging threat of ecological destruction.
Today churches are forced to respond to attacks from environmentalists on what the environmentalists perceive to be Christian apathy toward the environment. Many scan the Bible and extract an anthropocentric message that says little about the natural backdrop to our human play. At the same time more and more Christians believe following Jesus demands an ecological commitment, and that scripture sends a clear message about earth-care. Even more thinkers believe we need to move beyond reliance on technology and fundamentally alter our belief systems in order to address the environmental crisis. Efforts to do so must battle a worldview built up through centuries of Christocentric cultures. Anne Primavesi claims that if the worldview is commonly held and reasonably workable, it will be adhered to despite evidence to the contrary. The Christian worldview conveys a message about the earth that is perceived to be fundamentally at odds with the environmental movement.
My senior thesis, Christian Responses to the Environmental Crisis: A Typology, began on scraps of dirty paper, smudged with soil from the organic farm. Months later, it evolved into a document that addresses what Christianity has to say about nature, and how Christians today respond to the environmental crisis.
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