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Eco-reproductive ethics has received renewed attention within humanities disciplines, yet remains relatively unexplored within religious studies. Christian ethicists in particular tend to avoid these concerns by understating the extent to which human population growth exacerbates environmental threats. While such problems may initially appear to undermine Christian commitments (such as the goodness of human creation and procreation), in this paper I explore possibilities for moral response that draw upon Christian inheritances and traditions. Synthesizing insights from long-form interviews, I find that my Christian informants 1) take up kinship alternatives or “kinnovate” and 2) pursue minimally reproductive lives as part a broader religious vocation. I argue that these and other eco-reproductive interventions are significant in light of the underdeveloped literature on these topics; they gesture toward the identification and (re)application of moral resources that seek to address climate threats, especially within the contexts of religious and family life.
In environmental ethics, most attention to catastrophe and the moral life focuses exclusively on the human-wrought catastrophe of climate change or “the Anthropocene.” However, focusing on human-wrought catastrophe gives distorted perspective on what ‘proper moral response’ to catastrophe is. I will defend this through examining a case of moral response to natural catastrophe: I will turn to Job, who raises fundamental questions for Christian ethics. Job’s experience forces us to consider the limits of virtue and suggests the possibility that there may be responses to catastrophe that are good, non-virtuous, and against God. As such, Job should make us question the role and type of spiritual practice that can help people respond to catastrophe and the idea that virtue can help in responding to catastrophe well. I will end this paper by returning to our contemporary moment and what Job adds to the conversation about moral response to environmental catastrophe.
In March 2021, the German climate justice movement celebrated a big success before the German Supreme Court. The so-called “Climate Verdict” (Klimaurteil) forces the German government to establish laws regarding the country’s CO2 reduction goals beyond 2031. The verdict adds a temporal dimension to the legal concept of freedom, expanding it to include the rights of future, unborn citizens. But how can the freedoms of future citizens be anticipated appropriately in the present? Theological concepts by Lutheran and Reformed traditions are well-positioned to bridge this gap between current and future generations. They can address both as equal part of God’s creation – a thought captured in the German term “Mitgeschöpflichkeit” (co-createdness) – and ground the concept of freedom in the belief in God as the creator of life (“Verdanktheit”).
Climate change and environmental degradation present moral psychological challenges to response, notably the global and intergenerational scope. Because the vulnerabilities at issue involve a certain level of abstraction, representing them in imaginatively potent ways is critical. This project develops the moral aesthetics of human and environmental vulnerability (susceptibility to wounding) as a resource for ethical responsiveness. Criticisms that Christianity has shaped ethical dispositions inclined to passivity (or worse) towards environmental destruction are well-worn tropes at this point. But with regards to representing vulnerability, a theological approach may draw on a long history of reflection on the moral and aesthetic significance of wounds, central to the Christian narrative of crucifixion and redemption. In this paper I will develop aesthetic dimensions of a moral psychology (imagination and affective responses to figurative representation) responsive to environmental vulnerability through the prism of eschatological images of the resurrected wounds of creation.