Blog
Welcome to the new Yale Forum Blog!
We will be sharing a variety of original content including interviews, reviews, reports from the field, new and enhanced resources on the Forum website, content from our new video podcast series, FORE Spotlights, and much more.
Check back every Tuesday and Thursday for new content.
Today we'd like to highlight a couple of recent articles by Forum ally and former Dean of the Yale School of the Environment, Gus Speth. Speth served as chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality during the Carter administration; founded the World Resources Institure and co-founded the National Resources Defense Council; and served as Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme in the 1990s, among many other distinctions.
These articles were published by Resilience earlier...
Today we wanted to highlight a wonderful event happening this week: the 10th Rome and Assissi Spirituality & Sustainability Conference. This year's theme is “Contemplation & Action for Social and Ecological Renewal.” You can view the full program here.
From the Earth Charter site:
The 10th Spirituality & Sustainability...
We're very pleased to announce some of the changes taking place here at the Forum!
First, as we announced last week, our founders and directors, Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim are retiring from teaching after 5 decades. But, as this wonderful article about them from Yale School of the Environment expresses, we're not calling it their retirement, but their refirement! Though they have found great joy teaching for the last 50+ years, this change will allow them to spend even more time on their work here at the Forum....
This episode of Spotlights features writer and scholar Beatrice Marovich, PhD, associate professor of theological studies at Hanover college. We talk a little about her path into theology through engagements with literature and journalism. Then we discuss her new book, Sister Death: Political Theologies for Living and Dying (Columbia University Press, 2023), diving into theological, philosophical, political, cultural, and ecological implications of the way we think, feel, and act about death and its relationship to life. The figure of Sister Death...
On 22 May, a periodic supplement was released to highlight new and ongoing efforts within our online Faith Action database through the lens of SDG 15: Life on Land. This issue, titled Faith Action on the UN Sustainable Development Goals: Life on Land, highlights a sampling of organized efforts that protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems; sustainably manage forests; combat desertification; reduce and reverse land degradation; and halt biodiversity loss from a uniquely faith-driven lens.
This report’s topical...
Laudato Si' Week 2023 will be taking place next week, May 21-28. The theme this year is “Hope for the Earth. Hope for Humanity.”
This year, many of the activities will be based around a new film from the Laudato Si' Movement about the encyclical, titled The Letter.
From the film site:
The Letter, tells the story of a...
In honor of Mother's Day, as well as the passing of James Lovelock last year, we wanted to take a few moments to reflect on the concept of Gaia, Mother Earth.
Gaia (or Gaea) was the Greek goddess of Earth–the ancestral, elemental mother to all life on our planet. But the idea of Earth as Mother exists in many traditions around the world, in the form of Pachamama, Spider Grandmother,...
Tomorrow is Vesak, the Buddhist celebration of the Buddha's birth, death, and enlightenment. And today is the National Day of Prayer in the United States. In honor of the conjunction of these two holidays, we'd like take this opportunity to share a couple of Buddhist prayers and reflections concerning nature and the environment. If you have a favorite Buddhist prayer that speaks to the preservation and restoration of our natural world, we welcome you to share it here on our...
This episode of Spotlights features Joerg Rieger, PhD, Distinguished Professor of Theology and the Cal Turner Chancellor’s Chair of Wesleyan Studies at Vanderbilt University. He is also the founding director of the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice. We discuss his latest book, Theology in the Capitalocene: Ecology, Identity, Class, and Solidarity (Fortress Press, 2022), which explores the implications of the Anthropocene through theological inquiries into ecology, labor, capitalism, and intersectionality....
Arbor Day is tomorrow, so we wanted to share with you some tree-related resources to enhance your celebration of the trees and forests that give so much to us all year round.
First, we wanted to share again the recordings of the three online events that were held last year to celebrate the release of Orion Magazine's anniversary anthology Old Growth. Every one contains abundant gems of...