A Series of Public Online Conversations
“We need a more capacious sense of collectivity that can only emerge when we are willing to honor our stories and tell the truth about injustices that have shaped both environmental devastation and responses to it. A world of our many worlds.” —Mayra Rivera, HDS Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Religion and Latinx Studies
“This is the great burden that now rests upon writers, artists, filmmakers, and everyone else who is involved in the telling of stories: to us falls the task of imaginatively restoring agency and voice to nonhumans. As with all the most important artistic endeavors in human history, this is a task that is at once aesthetic and political—and because of the magnitude of the crisis that besets the planet, it is now freighted with the most pressing moral urgency.” —Amitav Ghosh, The Nutmeg’s Curse
Harvard Divinity School will host a series of online public conversations with members of the HDS faculty to explore what an expansive understanding of religion can provide in these times of Earth crisis. Each faculty member will respond to and build upon Professor Mayra Rivera’s American Academy of Religion 2022 Presidential Address, “What is the Role of the Study of Religion in Times of Catastrophe?” from their individual areas of expertise.
Sponsored by Religion and Public Life at Harvard Divinity School, The Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability at Harvard University, The Center for the Study of World Religions, The Constellation Project, and by HarvardX.
Hosted by Diane L. Moore, MDiv ’84, Associate Dean of Religion and Public Life
This six-part series will take place live on Zoom and is free and open to the public. Attendees must register for each event separately. Note: Due to scheduling challenges, we will no longer be able to offer the follow-up conversations.
January 29
Environmental catastrophes can create a break in the experience of time, they can rupture the possibility of collective meaning. Yet for communities shaped by colonialism and racism, this rupture can only be understood in relation to the past, as an event in the “unceremoniously archived procession of our catastrophes,” to use Édouard Glissant’s words. Histories of colonial and racial devastation teach us that environmental futures are linked to our pasts. We may describe them as “ancestral catastrophes,” as Elizabeth Povinelly suggests. In this session, Mayra Rivera explores the question, “How may we engage those stories in ways that honor our pasts and open possibilities for different futures?”
Mayra Rivera works at the intersections between philosophy of religion, literature, and theories of coloniality, race and gender—with particular attention to Caribbean postcolonial thought. Her research explores the relationship between discursive and material dimensions of existence in shaping human embodiment and socio-material ecologies. She is the author of The Touch of Transcendence (2007) and Poetics of the Flesh (2015). Rivera is currently working on a project that explores the relationships between coloniality and ecological thought through Caribbean thought.
February 5
Two hundred years ago, the residents of metropolitan Boston faced a climate crisis. White settlers had destroyed the region’s pine forests, triggering dangerous disruptions to both water and carbon cycles. Activists responded by creating forest parks on previously disrupted landscapes. But many of these activists were themselves descended from the settlers who had caused the harm they sought to heal. In imperfect yet instructive ways, they blended ecological care with new forms of ancestral devotion. Gradually they learned what indigenous communities had long known: that care for the more-than-human-world is inseparable from care for our ancestors. In this session, Dan McKanan, will discuss these stories and how they can help contemporary Bostonians, and others, recognize that what makes a place wild is not the absence of humans but the presence of ancestors.
Dan McKanan, AB '89, joined the HDS faculty in 2008. He researches religious and spiritual movements for social transformation in the United States and beyond. McKanan serves on the Unitarian Universalist Panel on Theological Education and the board of the Unitarian Universalist Studies Network. At Harvard, he serves as chair of the MTS Curriculum Committee and as faculty director for the Divinity School’s Program for the Evolution of Spirituality.
February 12
Across the Indian Ocean world, communities have shared stories while encountering legacies of modern state-centrism, colonial capitalism, post-colonial environmental destruction and religious reform. Muslim communities, among others, have shared stories of religious environments and animals that were inherited, transmitted, and reinterpreted in light of evolving ecological crises. These stories of multispecies ancestors and colonizers, Islamic conceptions of the environment, and narrative traditions of Islamic ecological care have confronted cycles of crises with visions of pasts and futures. In this session, Teren Sevea will discuss the question, “Can listening to these stories compel us to re-evaluate our academic approaches to religion and environments and the relationship of religious pasts and presents, in our time of crisis?”
Teren Sevea is a scholar of Islam and Muslim societies in South and Southeast Asia. Before joining HDS, he served as Assistant Professor of South Asia Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Sevea is the author of Miracles and Material Life: Rice, Ore, Traps and Guns in Islamic Malaya (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Currently, Sevea is coordinating the project “The Lighthouses of God: Mapping Sanctity Across the Indian Ocean,” which investigates the evolving landscapes of Indian Ocean Islam through photography, film and GIS technology.
February 26
Human-caused climate change already contributes to manifold global disasters. As the planet inevitably continues to warm, these disasters will be routine and unrelenting. Addressing the reality of loss must become a basic spiritual task of our climate present and future, along with summoning the resolve to respond to all our losses. In this session, Matthew Ichihashi Potts will consider the apocalyptic roots of the Christian tradition in order both to diagnose how Christianity has contributed to the present crisis, as well as to suggest possibilities for a different way forward. Through particular attention to grief and hope as religious categories, and with specific reference to various moments and movements from within the Christian tradition, Potts will reflect upon the spiritual crisis at the heart of climate catastrophe and suggest the potential for a religious response.
Matthew Ichihashi Potts, MDiv '08, PhD '13, was appointed the Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church and the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals in 2021. Potts has served on the faculty at Harvard Divinity School since 2013 and has focused his teaching on sacramental and moral theology, ministry and pastoral theology, religion and literature, and preaching. He is the author of two books, Cormac McCarthy and the Signs of Sacrament: Literature, Theology, and the Moral of Stories (Bloomsbury, 2015) and Forgiveness: An Alternative Account (Yale University Press, 2022). He sits on the editorial board of the journal Literature and Theology. He is also co-host of the podcast Harry Potter and the Sacred Text. Potts served as both an officer in the United States Navy and as a college administrator before being ordained a priest in the Episcopal Church.
March 4
Can personhood be granted to mountains, lakes, and rivers? What does it mean to be met by another species? How do we extend our notion of power to include all life forms? And what does a different kind of power look like and feel like? Wild Mercy is in our hands. Practices of attention in the field with compassion and grace deepen our kinship with life, allowing us to touch something deeper than hope. Great Salt Lake offers us a reflection into our own nature: Are we shrinking or expanding?
Terry Tempest Williams joined HDS as a writer-in-residence in 2017. She is the author of numerous books, including the environmental literature classic, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place. Her most recent book is The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks, which was published in June 2016 to coincide with and honor the centennial of the National Park Service. Her writing has also appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Orion Magazine, and numerous anthologies worldwide as a crucial voice for ecological consciousness and social change. While at HDS, Williams has taught seminars on the spiritual implications of climate change, apocalyptic grief, centering the wild and non-human voices, among others.
March 18
This session will be a discussion among presenters reflecting upon the insights shared throughout the series. In addition to identifying themes and throughlines among sessions, we will return to the overarching questions that framed this collaboration: What can an expansive understanding of religion provide in these times of Earth crisis? What is the role of the study of religion in times of catastrophe?
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