Religions, Ecology, & Our Environment: An interreligious and intergenerational conversation on religion and ecology

Religious communities today and throughout history have maintained complex and often diverse relationships with their physical environment. For many traditions, this rich relationship is accompanied by a deep sense of moral urgency that necessitates immediate action for the protection of our shared environment, given the prognosis of devastation predicted by the scientific community if human behaviour continues on course. As an issue that crosscuts the many facets of society, it is all-the-more crucial to explore environmental protection, as well as our relationships with the physical world, with a comparative and complementary lens.

Religions for Peace and the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology recognise the critical need to generate energy around spiritually-inspired environmental protection and sustainability. Thus, they are partnering to engage youth in the exploration of how religious, spiritual, or ethical approaches to environmental issues can complement approaches from science, policy, law, economics, or technology.

This webinar will be hosted on 2 October 2020 from 9:00 am – 11:00 am ET. We will introduce the work of the Yale Forum, listen to perspectives of young people of faith and of academic engagement, establish a knowledge base founded on concrete academic background, and promote creative and informed interventions to actively engage the issue of environmental protection from religious, spiritual, and ethical perspectives.

With a legacy of over 50 years, Religions for Peace advances common action among the world’s religious communities for a comprehensive, holistic and sustainable peace. The Religions for Peace movement, through its 90 national and 6 regional Interreligious Councils (IRCs) and their Women of Faith Networks and Interreligious Youth Networks, engage in key issues of critical concern, within its six Strategic Goals: Promote peaceful, just & harmonious societies; Advance gender equality; Nurture a sustainable environment; Champion freedom of thought, conscience and religion; Strengthen interreligious education, and Foster multi-religious collaboration and global partnerships.

The Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology is an international multi-religious project contributing to a new academic field and an engaged moral force of religious environmentalism. With its conferences, publications, monthly newsletter, and website, it explores religious worldviews, texts, and ethics in order to contribute to environmental solutions along with science, policy, law, economics, and appropriate technology. The Forum was founded at the United Nations in 1998 by Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim and has been based at Yale University since 2006.

This event will be live-streamed on the Religions for Peace Facebook page.