An Ecological Ethics for the Anthropocene: Environmental Justice and Religion

This essay examines the relationship between critical theological theories within avant-garde scholarship on religion as a social phenomenon and the equally, if not more, pressing revelations of climate scientists regarding the ecological crisis which is partly the result of a society whose faith has been misplaced in a form of unsustainable technology which threatens to destroy us. In order to take action in a world which has been and will become marred by ever-worsening environmental catastrophes, I argue that we need a new conception of earthly mysticism—one which sees humanity as a shaping force, guided by the political, economic, and innovative promises of secular humanism, but in need of a new morality which can govern the way we relate to the natural world both symbiotically and conscientiously. This new morality, I suggest, is already present in religious ecology, and bringing it into the mainstream, as a force for social, political, religious, and ecological sustainability, is the challenge of our time, both for theorists of the divine, which is ever-present even in secular modernity but threatened by false ideals of our duties of stewardship which undermine the resilience of creation, as well as practitioners of ritual and purveyors of catechism, who often, unfortunately, resist making determinations and proclamations which threaten to upend the status quo, but are necessarily consistent with the teachings of religion as they call on us to care for all things.

Recommended citation: Rice, James. (2024). "An Ecological Ethics for the Anthropocene: Environmental Justice and Religion." SRF Conference Paper 2024.