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.
This episode of Spotlights features Michael S. Northcott, PhD, Professor Emeritus of Ethics at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. He talks about his new book, God and Gaia: Science, Religion and Ethics on a Living Planet (Routledge, 2023), which explores the overlap between traditional religious cosmologies and the scientific Gaia theory of James Lovelock. The book engages with traditional cosmologies from the Indian Vedas and classical Greece to Medieval Christianity, including case material from Southeast Asia, Southern Africa, and...
Joyous 2023 to all of our readers and followers.
This year we'll be giving over a couple of posts a month to our theme for the year: Hope.
Eco-anxiety, grief, climate despair run rampant today. The news media only deepens this and often takes us to even darker places, as it demonstrates in full color the worst of our world.
Though awareness of these developments in the outer world is crucially important, we often...
Before we launch into 2023 tackling and talking about the environmental issues that our world is facing, we wanted to offer a spark of hope to begin this fresh, new year.
This is not in any way ignoring the difficulties we still face or the challenges ahead of us. But to face these challenges we need a foundation of hope–solid ground on which to stand as we strive to do the great work in the service of the Earth community.
Eco-anxiety, eco-grief, and Climate grief are running rampant...
This episode of Spotlights features Sam Mickey and Kimberly Carfore in conversation with a topic Sam has been researching recently: contemplative posthuman design, which is a way of bringing design thinking into dialogue with contemplative studies and the ecological sensibilities of posthumanism. It is a design approach that works with contemplative practices to envision ways of harmoniously integrating humans with the more-than-human world. Sam draws connections between these ideas and the work of the contemporary German philosopher,...
Joyous Solstice greetings to all!
In honor of Solstice , we would like to offer you this truly magnificent short poem from Yolande “Nikki” Giovanni Jr.
Ms. Giovanni is one of the world's most well-known African-American poets. Her work covers topics ranging from race and social issues to children's literature. She has won numerous awards, including the Langston Hughes Medal and the...
This episode of Spotlights features Kimberly Carfore, PhD, co-chair of the Religion and Ecology unit of the American Academy of Religion (AAR). The annual meeting of the AAR happened at the end of November. Dr. Carfore talks about the various panels hosted by the Religion and Ecology unit this year, including a panel on Dr. Christopher Carter’s book The Spirit of Soul Food, which was featured on this podcast earlier in the year. Dr. Carfore also gives a preview of what the Religion and Ecology unit is putting together for the 2023 meeting...
Since we released the Religions of the World and Ecology online courses through Yale/Coursera last December, we at the Forum have been frequently asked if it's possible to sample the course content before enrolling. We're very pleased to now share with you excerpts from the original course interviews, so you can get a taste of the rich content found in these classes.
Remember that the courses are always free to audit. To get the courses for free, please follow these...
Warmest greetings to all of you as the colder days approach here in the Northern Hemisphere. Here we highlight some of the wonderful events happening this December related to religion and ecology. To see all upcoming offerings, check out our event page.
12/8, 3pm EST
Green Sabbath Project Gathering
“The Time of Progress and the Times of the Planet” with Whitney Bauman
Online. Free and open to all. Register here.
During the covid pandemic...
This episode of Spotlights features Rowan Deer, PhD, author of Radical Animism: Reading for the End of the World (Bloomsbury, 2020), which brings together literary, philosophical, and scientific perspectives to rethink animism for the Anthropocene. She discusses the way her book juxtaposes authors like Virginia Woolf, Lewis Carroll, and William Shakespeare with the Copernican Revolution, Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, and Sigmund Freud's theory of the unconscious. She also discusses the the role of deconstruction in her...
From 6 to 18 November 2022, government delegations from 198 countries convened for the UN Climate Change Conference (COP27) in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. In advance of this global gathering, Yale Forum partners at Faith for Earth, an initiative of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), compiled a directory of all religiously-related side events held in relation to COP27. In addition to this curated list, UNEP Faith for Earth also also released a guide for faith actors–and other stakeholders...