Academic engagement with the field of religion and ecology often falls flat when it remains an idea, or ideology, in the head. We are coming to realize it isn’t enough to change words, but that it is imperative to change worlds. This panel engages la labor de nuestros manos (the work of our hands) through practical ecotheology. Scholars advocate for outdoor experiential education for seminaries, examine the act of resistance through seed-saving, and highlight the work of religious climate activism and Catholic place-based agricultural pedagogy.
This paper explores the themes of religion and ecology by examining the changing posture of Catholic agricultural programming in Canada and the United States. Whereas most analysis of Catholic social thought emphasizes its doctrinal features, this paper considers the actual pedagogical mechanisms with which the Catholic Church participates in the public sphere through its social and ecological teaching. It examines specifically how Catholic agricultural programmes act as pedagogical “hubs” which deliver practical agricultural training, but also promote Catholic ecological, social, and economic principles through various public vectors. Ethnographic research carried out at three Canadian training sites highlights three recent developments: an emphasis on practical place-based programming, the pursuit of secular partnerships, and increasingly decentralized political advocacy. Subsequent discussions around sustainability, secularity, and subsidiarity have application outside the Catholic world, especially as climate change forces religious communities to confront issues of land sovereignty, agronomic industry, and the rights of citizens.
This paper explores how outdoor experiential education (OEE), taken as a means of spiritual formation centered around the experience of ‘wildness’, can enable seminarians–as spiritual leaders–to better engage with our ecological crisis. Taking seriously the charge that our dominant paradigms ill-equip us in facing the very consequences of the extractive and destructive systems that they perpetuate, what appears necessary is a transformation of our epistemologies. Seminaries ought to consider this need for epistemic transformation seriously in their pedagogy and embrace OEE as a means of spiritual formation. Empirical research and literary evidence have long established the connection between outdoor experience and spiritual transformation. Yet there appears to be a conceptual and disciplinary ‘gap’ between OEE and religious education. This paper develops ‘wildness’ as a keystone experience and ‘bridging’ concept, and addresses the Christian roots of OEE in America as a means to historically integrate these two fields.
The Catholic Climate Covenant is an environmental nonprofit organization based in Washington D.C. Some of their initiatives include petitions, solar power, climate prayers, and community events. Seven of their articles emphasize the intersection of sustainability with well-being, which I focus on in my paper. My methods focus on examining each of the articles which address well-being on the organization’s website. I find three themes of presenting sustainable behaviors as part of the Catholic identity, essential for protecting the poor, and fundamental to well-being. The Catholic Climate Covenant demonstrates how a faith can substantially motivate sustainability efforts through a nonprofit organization medium.
Whatever possibilities persist for meaningful human community amid climate catastrophe, none will be possible without seeds. It is thus worth asking: What concepts can seeds create? What can environmental justice advocates learn from seeds? What does seed-saving have to teach scholars of religion? While the ecological importance of biodiversity is well-documented, the impending cultural disasters accompanying climate change warrant a serious exploration of the value of seeds beyond the ecological.
In any account of the intersections between religion, labor, and environment, it is necessary to consider not only human labor with and among the more-than-human but, further, the labor of the more-than-human, as such. Thus, what of the labor of seed-savers and seed-keepers? How might this vital work disclose anti-capitalist forms of laboral interrelation? Further, what of the laboral value of seeds, themselves, wherein value is figured in anti-capitalist registers? What can seeds unveil at economic, epistemological, indeed ecotheological levels?