Date | Lead | Topic | Resources |
Dec 1 | Michaela,Doug, Katie | Shifting Climates #1 |
Shifting Climates podcast website |
Dec 8 | Michaela | Shifting Climates #2 | |
Dec 15 | Jared | Current state of climate science | Meet at Science on a sphere, at JMU’s Memorial Hall. (Directions here) |
Dec 22 | No SS | ||
Dec 29 | No SS | ||
Jan 5 | Doug GN | Climate anxiety; hope and despair | Katherine Hayhoe “A Climate of Hope”; Watch minutes 17:30 to 47:30 of the video (although the long follow-up is good also). This is a recorded talk that is not just about climate anxiety, but is an important frame to think about it. And if you haven’t heard Hayhoe, you need to – she’s a “rock star” climate scientist and climate communicator (see her PBS “Global Weirding” series), and also a Christian at the forefront of engaging faith communities. Another good resource is work by Renee Lertzman, who has written about “environmental melancholia”. She has a number of talks and article posted on her website. Her interview on the podcast “No place like home” is also interesting. |
Jan 12 | Doug Kaufman | Reflections on engaging Mennonite congregations on climate change | Doug runs the “Who cares about climate change?” pastoral retreats for Mennonite (and other) pastors |
Jan 19 | Everett Brubaker | Conservative Mennonite Churches and climate change | |
Jan 26 | Katie | Climate actions | Katie is working as a CSCS Climate Futures Fellow on a year-long project developing a set of strategic plans for different churches. You can read about her work here. |
Feb 2 | Peter Dula | Anabaptist Environmental Ethics | Peter has an upcoming article in the Mennonite Quarterly Review reviewing Anabaptist approaches to environmental ethics. You can read a short summary on the of his article at the bottom of this page. |
Feb 9 | Michaela | Shifting Climates – Climate Justice | |
Feb 16 | Katie | Climate youth voices | MYF will help us to think about the youth perspective on the climate crisis. |
Feb 23 | Doug | Climate actions | What is your carbon footprint, and what can you do about it? We’ll spend this session talking about specific actions and approaches to reduce our carbon footprint. Some resources from the session today: Powerpoint for today’s session Carbon footprint calculators Carbon Footprint CoolClimate Drawdown website; Sheet showing rankings of climate actions that was handed out in class. “How peer pressure can help stop climate change” – Good Washington Post article about personal actions. CMC’s voluntary carbon tax; You can use this calculator to estimate your ‘tax. Contributes can go to CMC Green congregation committee. |
Green CMC
Carbon Tax calculator – use this tool to calculate your ‘carbon tax’ (an attempt to get towards a true cost of our activities). Paying this carbon tax to CMC goes towards mitigation projects like the planned solar array.
Resources
One thing you can do: Know your climate facts, A good list of web resources from the NY Times.
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The Mennonite Quarterly Review
Excerpt from introduction to the Jan 2020 issue, by Luke Beck Kreider:
“As Peter Dula’s survey of the literature indicates, North American Anabaptist thinkers already answer the questions raised by environmental problems in a wide variety of ways. To organize a diverse and complex field, Dula, who is a professor of religion and culture at Eastern Mennonite University, uses a typology developed by Laurel Kearns and Willis Jenkins, mapping Anabaptist environmental theologies according to three categories: eco-justice, stewardship, and ecological spirituality. Jenkins had argued that Anabaptist environmentalism represents an exemplary form of Christian stewardship, but Dula finds Anabaptists increasingly working within all three theological types, most notably in ecological spirituality. That conceptual diversity is only a problem, he suggests, if it distracts from the practical, political challenges of deliberating together about how to do justice and sustain love amid environmental crisis. For all their earthy pretensions, environmental ethicists—Anabaptists included—tend toward abstraction, toward cosmological musings, rather than the practical questions of how to confront our common problems. For Dula, the future of Anabaptist environmental ethics looks most hopeful where it takes shape within embodied social movements, where the church endeavors to discern through concerted, creative environmental action what God is doing and what discipleship means in a fragile, fractured world.
Dula’s review draws in part on my own essay, which identifies three main varieties of contemporary Anabaptist environmental ethics: agrarian virtue, bio-regionalist (or “watershed”) discipleship, and eschatological eco-pacifism. In the essay I describe, criticize, and partially reconstruct each type in terms of how it addresses environmental racism and environmental justice. Environmental racism describes the ways ingrained systems of racial inequality conspire to distribute environmental hazards and costs disproportionately to communities of color, while securing comparatively safe and ecologically attractive environments for white communities. Broadly speaking, environmental justice is the term for movements (and the moral frameworks they developed) to combat environmental racism and similar forms of environmental injustice. Anabaptist environmental ethics center on efforts to bear witness to God’s peace within creation, but environmental racism perpetuates ecologies of violence. Anabaptist scholars and practitioners should therefore take environmental racism as a central concern. The essay suggests how all three varieties of Anabaptist environmental ethics could deepen their core insights and sharpen their defining practices by learning from environmental justice movements.
Both Dula and I discuss how the Anabaptist watershed discipleship movement formed in dialogue with other forms of North American environmentalism, including environmental justice and bio-regionalist movements.”