Religion and the Anthropocene

Jill Schneiderman is an earth scientist, an environmental justice activist and a Buddhist. She’s a professor at Vassar and author of four books, including The Earth Around Us: Maintaining a Livable Planet (2003) and Liberation Science: Putting Science to Work for Social and Environmental Justice (2012). A pioneer in work at the intersection of science and activism, she’s also a committed meditator. In 2009 she was a fellow of the Association for Contemplative Mind in Higher Education , where she helped develop curriculum on geologic time and contemplative practice. The essay we read, “Awake in the Anthropocene,” touches on many of these concerns. It appeared in 2012 in Contemporary Buddhism , an interdisciplinary academic journal.  The main argument of “Awake in the Anthropocene” is that Buddhist thought has something important to offer those who seek to respond effectively to problems of violence and anthropogenic climate change. Drawing on Rob Nixon’s ideas of “slow violence” a...

Join us as we make our way through works by Whitney Bauman, Nils Bubandt, Octavia Butler , Jeremy Davies, Heather Davis & Zoe Todd , Nicola Davison , Francis of Assisi, Pope Francis , Gandhi, Donna Haraway, Katharine Hayhoe, Winona LaDuke, Fabrice Monteiro, Sara Pike, Emily Raboteau, Deborah Bird Rose, Jill Schneiderman , Roy Scranton , Vandana Shiva , Will Steffen , Bronislaw Szerszynski, Françoise Vergès , Carol Wayne White, Lynn White, Kyle Powys Whyte and Kathryn Yusoff and explore religious texts such as the Bhagavad Gita , the Bible , Dao De Jing and Earthseed .