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Public Event:
29-30 September -
Faith, Justice and the Earth:
An InterFaith Conference

About the 2005 Transdisciplinary Colloquium

This scholarly symposium will explore the sustaining causes of the ecological crisis and remaining hopes for its mitigation. Following the model of previous trandisciplinary colloquia at Drew, papers will be distributed and read in advance by all colloquium attendees.

The following is an initial background meditation—very provisional--designed to stimulate reflection for the papers and conversations of the symposium.

“ Merely to observe human life is to take note of how important are all the elements of nature and the global ecosystem in sustaining it. Even before any so-called scientific formulation, one can easily see the wisdom present in all entities that spontaneously seek conditions propitious for their well-being.” (Ivone Gebara, Out of the Depths, 134)

“Political ecology has nothing whatsoever to do with nature, this jumble of Greek philosophy, French Cartesianism, and American parks.” (Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature, 220)

The ecological crisis, recognized as a spiritual crisis, has generated a branch of theology and of religious practice, an ecotheology, attempting to apply theologies of creation and ethics of stewardship to the problems of eco-social justice. But in the process, is ecology not shifting the meaning of theology, indeed of religion? Faith and its discourses inscribe themselves upon a planetary surface, which now announces itself as the context and constraint of every theological claim. The very nature of theologos –and so of “nature” itself, the physis and the kosmos of the logos—comes into question.

It is especially the work of ecofeminist theology (as represented preeminently by Rosemary Radford Ruether), which reveals the possible metamorphosis of theology into a word or wisdom of planetary responsibility. If the very logos of “nature” thereby comes into question, the theories of linguistic and social construction deconstruct the assumption of “a prematurely unified background of nature” (Latour). Indeed nature as objective background or as ontology, in science and in religion, has functioned as a largely anti-democratic, and now therefore also anti-ecological, force. But does the “denaturing” of such extralinguistic realities as—nature, world, cosmos, indeed, reality—only further inhibit the struggle to activate human responsibility for the earth? Does the push of Protestant theology to ignore cosmology, and of most religion to transcend its earthly context, not reinforce the more disembodied trends of theory? Despite nearly half a century of ecological warnings, there persists an addictive haze of indifference toward the differences comprising the earth—in its inconceivable multiplicity of species differences, in its dainty difference from a yet more unknowable, mysteriously expansive multiverse. Does a spiritual otherworldliness find itself mirrored in a worldly postmodernism—inasmuch as both cede the materiality of earth to the machines of consumption?

Might a more vital engagement between poststructuralism and ecotheology, with its roots in feminist, liberation and process Christianities help-- surprisingly--to clarify a rhetoric for activism, for a political ecology? Such an ecology and its politics require an intensively interdisciplinary , international and indeed internatural collaboration. Resisting the terrors of imperial unilateralism, might there emerge a terrestrial multilateralism? Or as Latour puts it, multiculturalism must engage “multinaturalism.”

Specific biblical, philosophical, sociological readings of the ecological crisis and hope will make possible this interdisciplinary theological forum. But the interdisciplinarity is always also transdisciplinarity, as emergent from and aimed toward its own fuller embodiment in collective practice. Such a discussion takes part in the ecological metamorphosis of Christian thought and practice as both an iteration of premodern cosmology and an anticipation of a postmodern planetarity. The ecofeminist spiritual resonance of this planetarity might be considered an ecosophical theology. Might we advance a wisdom practice that moves beyond both the timeless ‘logos’ of a discarnate transcendence, and “the masculine birth of time” of its scientific sons --toward a Sophia shared by the collectivity of human and nonhuman natures?

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© 2005, Drew University
Drew Transdisciplinary Theology Colloquium Series
For more information, contact Rick Bohannon.