Spiritual Ecology: A Universal Grounding

A common caricature of traditional religions is that they are insulated from progressive social engagement, instead focused on ancient texts, life-after-death concerns and opposition to science education. Many comments along these lines followed this week’s posts by Adam and Marcelo.

I’m spending this week at a conference called The Energy Transition: Religious and Cultural Perspectives, organized by the Institute on Religion in an Age of Science (IRAS) on Star Island off the coast of New Hampshire. I came with a vague sense that the traditions had become engaged in matters relating to climate change and global sustainability, but I was unaware of the depth and scope of that engagement. Here’s a sampling of their commitment.

• The National Religious Partnership for the Environment is a coalition of Catholic, Jewish, mainline Protestant and Evangelical groups, where links to individual initiatives are found at the site (e.g. the Evangelical Environmental Network).

• Interfaith Power and Light promotes religious responses to climate change.

• The Unitarian Universalist Ministry for Earth has a broad scope of concerns.

• Bill McKibben’s 350.org includes active participation by religious congregations.

• Greenfaith: Interfaith Partners for the Environment includes programs on urban pollution.

• Genesis Farm is sponsored by the Sisters of St. Dominic.

• Eric Chivian’s Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School has established a Scientists and Evangelicals Initiative that recently briefed the U.S. Senate on climate change. And

• A film Renewal: Stories from America’s Religious Environmental Movement is available that describes American environmental activists from Christian, Jewish, Muslim and Buddhist traditions.

Marcelo writes of “spiritual ecology” as a moral universal, one with the potential to serve as one of the higher grounds as we move from the sterile science-religion debates between fundamentalist and atheistic believers (yes, I would say that “strident atheism” is a fundamentalist belief). Spiritual ecology is, of course, fully open to those of us who are not affiliated with a traditional religion. But to me it is very exciting to realize that this is a path that we can all walk together.