Religious Ethics and the Ecological Crisis
Prerequisites: THEO 100, THEO 107, or equivalent; please check requirements for declared majors/minors for exceptions.
Advances in technology and industry confront us with unprecedented abilities for altering long standing climate patterns. These capacities challenge many traditional religious and ethical assumptions about humanity and our relationship to the nonhuman world. We will examine the resources that religious traditions of the world offer for promoting ecological responsibility.
Outcomes: students will be able to:*Summarize relevant history related to scientific, policy & political data and decisions *Describe central scientific and ethical challenges posed by the climate crisis *Relate key ideas, traditions, & practices in Christian theological, philosophical, and other religious thought that may help address this crisis
Prerequisites: THEO 100, THEO 107, or equivalent; please check requirements for declared majors/minors for exceptions.
Advances in technology and industry confront us with unprecedented abilities for altering long standing climate patterns. These capacities challenge many traditional religious and ethical assumptions about humanity and our relationship to the nonhuman world. We will examine the resources that religious traditions of the world offer for promoting ecological responsibility.
Outcomes: students will be able to:*Summarize relevant history related to scientific, policy & political data and decisions *Describe central scientific and ethical challenges posed by the climate crisis *Relate key ideas, traditions, & practices in Christian theological, philosophical, and other religious thought that may help address this crisis
Restricted to Rome Center students
Tier 2 Theological Knowledge
Bioethics
Catholic Studies
Peace, Justice, and Conflict Studies
This class is restricted to Rome Center students.
Across the globe so many socio-political values have their origins in religious ethical systems. Historically
Christian moral theology has been uniquely powerful in providing structure and content to political and legal systems across the western and colonial worlds. The authors of Genesis present us with the first commands of the Creator to humanity, `¿Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it¿¿¿(Gen.1.28). In the past these words have been taken as a free pass for universal exploitation of resources: animal, vegetable and mineral.
When we look beyond this paradigm of dominance for humanity¿s stewardship, grounded on an `othering¿ of the created world, we uncover alternative worldviews which offer holistic rather than hierarchical models and place humanity within nature rather than apart from it.
The first part of THEO 204 introduces the concepts and definitions of `religion¿, ethics¿ and `ecological crisis¿ to clarify the basic parameters for our studies. We then take a brief journey through history to uncover the process whereby religious ethics evolved to designate the human species as a phenomenon apart from the rest of the material world.
Conversely, we¿ll examine alternative historical movements within Christian culture which were challenging this hierarchical notion of humanity over nature. Examples include Francis of Assisi, founder of the Franciscan movement and Hildegard of Bingen, polymath, mystic and visionary.
Moving on to the cyclical and timeless worldviews of Asian religious/cultural contexts, we discover notions of re-birth which fuse humanity as one with the natural world. How does this status of humanity impact on ethics towards non-human life and ecology?
Cyclical and non-time bound traditions share elements of their world views with indigenous traditions whose spirituality is bound to the earth, to their particular piece of land on this earth. This connection to a particular sacred place is rooted in a relationship of mutual dependence/mutual survival. We¿ll be studying examples of these traditions from the Americas and Australia, examining their ethical understanding and approach to nature, as well as the impact colonialism has had on these values, beliefs and practices.
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