Title: The Present and the Future in the Present: Religion, Values, and Climate Change
Abstract: Many people have come to the conclusion that simply sharing the scientific data on global warming with the public has not been enough to motivate the kind of consistent action that would be needed to successfully address the threat it presents. In this lecture I consider whether religion might have some unique role to play in bringing such action about. At the core of my argument are the claims that religions often transform everyday understandings of temporality and that notions of temporality in turn profoundly shape the way people approach realizing the values they hold. In light of these claims, I suggest that religion can play a role in fostering climate action that many other institutions have not been able to play successfully. Throughout the lecture, I draw on work in the anthropology of religion and time, one the one hand, and in the philosophy of values, on the other, to build my argument.
