Join the Lynch School as we kick off the Fall Faculty Speaker Series! Event information below:

The Present and the Future in the Present: Religion, Values, and Climate Change

Joel Robbins – University of Cambridge

Many people have come to the conclusion that simply sharing the scientific data on
global warming with the public has not been enough to motivate the kind of consistent action that would be needed to successfully address the threat it presents. In this lecture I consider whether religion might have some unique role to play in bringing such action about. At the core of my argument are the claims that religions often transform everyday understandings of temporality and that notions of temporality in turn profoundly shape the way people approach realizing the values they hold, including those related to climate change. In light of these claims, I suggest that religion can play a role in fostering climate action that many other institutions have not been able to play successfully. Throughout the lecture, I draw on work in the anthropology of religion and time, on the one hand, and in the philosophy of values, on the other, to build my argument.