Religion and Global Challenges

Arbah, a PhD Theology student at the University of Cambridge, interviews Jeeves Rohilla, CEO of the National Multifaith Youth Centre and now also studying at Cambridge, about interfaith futures and the role of young people in shaping them. The discussion covers the importance of co-creating programmes with young people, the intersection of interfaith and social justice, and challenges faced by young people in fostering interfaith dialogue. Jeeves shares insights from his experiences and emphasizes the need for inclusive and dynamic interfaith initiatives, particularly in engaging with youth, social media, climate change, and AI. The conversation also touches on gender-based violence and how interfaith collaboration can contribute to creating safer spaces for all genders. The interview opens with a reflection on Reverend Claudette Douglas’s legacy as a multifaith education chaplain and underscores the importance of long-term strategic planning.

0:20 Introduction and Guest Welcome

00:55 Tribute to Reverend Claudette Douglas

01:40 Interfaith Futures and Youth Involvement

05:44 Challenges in Interfaith Dialogue

08:53 Building Effective Interfaith Partnerships

09:45 Future of Interfaith Work and Social Justice

11:40 Interfaith Collaboration in Tackling Gender-Based Violence

15:44 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Resources mentioned

• Faiths Forum for London
• The National Multifaith Youth Centre
• Research by Sophie Mitchell, Faith & Belief Forum

Susie Triffitt, a PhD student in Theology and Anthropology, introduces her friend the Reverend Nathanael Poole, who shares his experiences and insights on interfaith work in Bradford, a city so religiously diverse it matches Pew research projections for the world in 2050. Nathanael discusses interactions with Muslim and Hindu communities, highlighting the importance of honest dialogue and shared spaces, like Park Run, for fostering interfaith connection. Challenges such as self-censorship and community segregation are addressed, alongside his thoughts on religious education and sensitive storytelling in schools. Nathanael reflects on changing faith dynamics, the decline of aggressive atheism, and a renewed interest in spiritual and theistic faiths among young people. The conversation emphasizes the ongoing importance and potential of interfaith engagement for future community harmony.

00:00 Introduction to the Cambridge Interfaith Programme

00:50 Meet Reverend Nathanael Poole

02:20 Challenges in Interfaith Dialogue

04:59 Interfaith in Non-Religious Spaces

07:20 Policy and Education in Interfaith Contexts

12:30 Interfaith Experiences with Hindu and Sikh Communities

15:02 Reflections on Faith and Interfaith Futures

16:48 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Religion and Conflict MPhil student Julia interviews Arezoo Farahzad, a television producer, director, and chair of an interfaith charity in Plymouth, UK. They discuss Arezoo's initiatives, including an annual interfaith festival and monthly international dinners aimed at fostering community and cultural understanding. Arezoo emphasizes that these events celebrate unity and dialogue among different faiths and generations without experiencing tensions. She shares insights on how food acts as a unifier and a springboard for deeper interfaith discussions, and reflects on her personal journey and the teachings of the Baha'i Faith. The conversation also touches on broader societal issues, the importance of global cooperation, and the role of schools in promoting interfaith dialogue.

00:00 Introduction and Guest Welcome

00:39 Arezoo's Work and Interfaith Initiatives

01:15 The Role of Food in Interfaith Dialogue

01:45 Experiences and Lessons from Interfaith Events

05:08 Challenges and Solutions in Interfaith Work

07:40 Global Perspectives and Collective Solutions

09:56 The Importance of Dialogue and Education

15:06 Future of Interfaith Relations and Personal Reflections

17:24 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Resources mentioned

• Plymouth Centre for Faiths and Cultural Diversity, pcfcd.co.uk
• International Dinner (Plymouth)

Arbah, a PhD Theology student at the University of Cambridge, interviews the Reverend Dr Alex Clare Young, a trans non-binary United Reformed Church minister and theologian. They discuss the challenges and assumptions affecting intersectionality and inclusivity in interfaith futures.

Dr Clare Young emphasizes the importance of queer theology, their doctoral research and book “Trans Formations,” and the need for LGBTQIA+ voices in theological discussions. They share personal experiences of overcoming discrimination, fostering allyship, and the transformative power of joy in their work.

The interview also covers the importance of moving from tolerance to celebration of diversity in public spaces and educational systems, and the need for policy adaptations to support these changes.

00:00 Introduction and Guest Welcome

01:07 Understanding Interfaith Futures

01:49 Challenges in Queer Theology

02:56 Personal Motivations and Experiences

04:32 Transformative Conversations

05:51 Identity and Interfaith Work

08:26 Joy in Leadership

09:49 Future of Interfaith and Inclusive Spaces

12:08 Policy and Planning for Diversity

14:52 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Resources mentioned

• Joy Laddin
• Alex Clare Young (2024) Trans Formations: Grounding Theology in Trans and Non-Binary Lives

Reem, a first-year PhD student at the Faculty of Divinity, interviews Professor Chris Baker from Goldsmiths University of London, to discuss the role of faith in public life. Baker emphasizes the importance of “radical ontology,” alternative social visions, and “radical practice” as contributions of faith groups to policy-making. He highlights examples where faith communities have influenced urban sustainability and grassroots projects. The conversation also touches on the necessity of integrating faith perspectives into policy development and overcoming secular biases in policymaking. Baker advocates for greater interfaith collaboration and the inclusion of young faith leaders in climate change initiatives and public policy formation.

00:00 Introduction and Guest Welcome

01:09 The Role of Faith in Public Life

03:54 Faith and Urban Sustainability

05:34 Co-Creation of Climate Policy

07:32 Engaging Faith Communities in Policy Making

10:20 Future of Interfaith Collaboration

12:46 Clarifying Misunderstandings about Faith Contributions

15:22 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

PhD student Peach interviews Laura Marks CBE, a distinguished policy advisor and interfaith social activist. Marks discusses the evolution of Mitzvah Day, which she founded as a Jewish-led initiative promoting interfaith collaboration through acts of community service. She reflects on how the interfaith landscape has changed over the years, highlighting the significance of positive engagement among diverse faith communities. Marks also shares her experiences establishing women-led interfaith partnerships, Nisa Nashim and the Women's Faith Forum, emphasizing the unique resilience and impactful roles these groups play. Toward the end of the conversation, a question about the presence of young people in interfaith settings, prompts reflection on how to ensure future generations continue to engage in and benefit from interfaith dialogue, with an eye to social cohesion.

00:00 Introduction and Guest Welcome

01:13 The Vision and Evolution of Mitzvah Day

05:35 The Role of Women in Interfaith Activities

08:23 Challenges and Opportunities in Women's Interfaith Work

10:29 Engaging the Next Generation in Interfaith Dialogue

15:22 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Resources mentioned:

• Mitzvah Day mitzvahday.org.uk
• Nisa Nashim: Jewish Muslim Women’s Network www.nisanashim.com
• The Women’s Faith Forum

In this episode, host Noah Rouse engages in discussion with Professor Michael Pollitt, Professor of Business Economics at Cambridge Judge Business School. They explore the intersection of faith, economics, and climate change, with Pollitt pressing the case for faith leaders to support economic solutions like carbon markets. The conversation touches on overcoming theologians’ misconceptions about market economies, the role of faith in historic social movements, and the potential for faith-based leadership to inspire action in addressing global climate challenges. Professor Pollitt emphasizes the need for a clear, unified ask from faith groups to make significant progress on climate policy, highlighting youth activism as a cause for optimism.

00:00 Introduction and Host Background

00:46 Guest Introduction: Professor Michael Pollitt

01:13 Professor Pollitt's Research Overview

02:09 Religion and Economics in Climate Change

04:45 Faith Leaders and Market Economists

05:37 Historical Precedents of Faith Movements

06:55 The Role of Faith in Climate Policy

08:24 Challenges and Opportunities for Faith-Based Climate Action

11:03 Uniting Faith and Secular Efforts

13:29 Hope and Solutions for Climate Change

16:17 Final Reflections and Hopeful Initiatives

17:48 Conclusion and Thanks

Cambridge Interfaith Programme Manager Dr Iona Hine interviews Professor Laurie Zoloth about her recent book, Ethics for the Coming Storm. The conversation was recorded via Zoom in June 2024 and is now included as an extension to the Religion and Climate Change miniseries.

Laurie Zoloth is Margaret E Burton Professor of Ethics at the University of Chicago and former Dean of Chicago’s Divinity School. She has served as President of the American Academy of Religion, President of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities, and Vice President of the Society for Jewish Ethics. Professor Zoloth was also a founding board member for the International Society for Stem Cell Research, the Society for Neuroethics, and the Society for Scriptural Reasoning. She holds a Life Fellowship at Clare Hall, Cambridge.

Ethics for the Coming Storm: Climate Change and Jewish Thought (2023) was published by Oxford University Press.

How can we come to understand our existence on this earth, surrounded by air and light and water, while living in a place we deliberately and carelessly abuse, where resources are becoming scarce, and where the well-being and basic health of our neighbors is threatened?

Debates about environmental issues have largely been driven by the language of economics and political power. They have become both deeply divisive and symbolic, turning differing truth claims and moral appeals into signs of identity. This discourse has utterly failed to change the human behavior or political and economic structures necessary to face global warming head on.

In Ethics for the Coming Storm, Zoloth turns to another language, found in the texts and traditions of Jewish thought—the language of Scripture, the Talmud, and philosophy of Judaism—which, she contends, offers a different kind of argument for such a change. The traditions, histories, and texts of Jewish thought, Zoloth claims, address precisely the sort of existential crisis that we now face, and thus deepen and enrich our public discourse about what to do, and who to be.

The following is a non-exhaustive list of persons referred to during this episode.

Bill McKibben (1960–)

Author of The End of Nature (1989), the first general audience book about climate change billmckibben.com/bio.html

Emmanuel Levinas (1905–1995)

In the opening chapter of Ethics for the Coming Storm, Zoloth summarises Levinas as follows: “The act of ethics, for Levinas, is the moment of recognition of the plight of the Other, and it is the phenomenological event of this recognition that he teaches ... prior to the recognition of the Other, the self is not fully constituted or called into being.” See further: plato.stanford.edu/entries/levinas/

Fritz Haber (1868–1934)

Winner of the 1918 Nobel Prize in Chemistry recognising his innovative Haber-Bosch process used to synthesise ammonia for agriculture.

Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)

Exiled from Nazi Germany, Arendt became a highly influential political philosopher. After introducing Arendt, Zoloth summarises: “For Arendt, the actions of citizens in public are the actions that define them as individuals with particular, irreplaceable identity, for in the social what matters is not their being, but their social role, and as consumers or producers, they are, like their products, completely replaceable, expendable. Agency in public allows for the defining acts of freedom and equality that are critical to our humanity.” See also plato.stanford.edu/entries/arendt/index.html.

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804)

Perhaps the premiere philosopher of European modernity, Kant’s influence over metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy, and aesthetics continues. See plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant/.

Jimmy Carter (1924–)

39th President of the USA (1977-1981) and the first to take concrete action about climate change. See: www.whitehouse.gov/about-the-white-house/presidents/james-carter/

Margarete Susman (1872–1966)

Philosopher, cultural critic, and essayist, Susman was part of the circle around Georg Simmel. See: plato.stanford.edu/entries/susman-margarete/

Naomi Oreskes

Henry Charles Lea Professor of the History of Science, Harvard University. See: histsci.fas.harvard.edu/people/naomi-oreskes

Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971).

American Reformed theologian and ethicist, known for his political realism. See plato.stanford.edu/entries/realism-intl-relations/

In the discussion about further reading, the following people and works are referred to:

Dale Jamieson (2014) Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed -- and What It Means for Our Future Get access Arrow

Mark Lynas (2008) Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet

Matt Ridley, British journalist--author of several crosscutting books on science and policy www.mattridley.co.uk/biography/

Natan Levy, H. Haleem & D. Shreeve (2013) Sharing Eden: Green Teachings from Jews, Christians and Muslims

Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013) Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

Sarah E. Fredericks (2021) Environmental Guilt and Shame: Signals of Individual and Collective Responsibility and the Need for Ritual Responses

Yale Forum on Religion & Ecology fore.yale.edu

In this second instalment of our mini-series on religion and climate change, we host Dr Hjördis Becker-Lindenthal (University of Cambridge) and Dr Simone Kotva (University of Oslo) to talk about the reverberations of Christian theology within environmental movements. Together we discuss how to face the end of the world as we know it, how to tackle climate despair, and what it might mean to cultivate a spiritual attitude toward nature. 

Music: Pacing by Chad Crouch

Bios

Dr Simone Kotva is Research Fellow at the Faculty of Theology, University of Oslo, and Affiliated Lecturer at the Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge. Simone's work is situated at the intersection of theology, critical theory and earth ethics. With Hjördis Becker-Lindenthal she teaches the MPhil module, Theology in the Anthropocene, and has published widely on religion and ecology. 

Dr Hjördis Becker-Lindenthal is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow and affiliated lecturer at the Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge. She works on the intersection of philosophy, theology, intellectual history and literature. Hjördis published a study on The Repetition of Philosophy: Kierkegaard’s Cultural Critique and its Consequences (Die Wiederholung der Philosophie. Kierkegaards Kulturkritik und ihre Folgen (De Gruyter)) and she is currently writing a monograph on Kierkegaard’s reception of the medieval mystic Johannes Tauler. Together with Dr Simone Kotva, Hjördis teaches the MPhil course Envisioning the Environmental Future: Theology in the Anthropocene at the Faculty of Divinity in Cambridge.

References

• Becker-Lindenthal, Hjördis (forthcoming), “Climate Despair from a Kierkegaardian Perspective: Asceticism, Possibility and Eschatological Hope”. In Living in Uncertainty. Kierkegaard and Possibility, ed. by Erin Plunkett, London: Bloomsbury.
• Becker-Lindenthal, Hjördis and Simone Kotva (forthcoming), “Practicing for Death in the Anthropocene:Reading Christian Asceticism After the End of the Human.”
• Bruckner, Pascal (2013), The Fanaticism of the Apocalypse: Save the Earth, Punish Human Beings, translated by Stephen Rendall, Cambridge: Polity.
• Garrard, Greg (2013), “Environmentalism and the Apocalypse Tradition,” Green Letters 3: 27–68. 
• Keller, Catherine (2018), Political Theology of the Earth: Our Planetary Emergency and the Struggle for a New Public, New York: Columbia University Press.
• Keller, Catherine (2021), Facing Apocalypse: Climate, Democracy, and Other Last Chances, Marknoll: Orbis Books.
• Kierkegaard, Søren (1980 [1849]), The Sickness Unto Death. A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening, ed. and trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Kierkegaard’ Writings, XIX),Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Kotva, Simone and Eva-Charlotta Mebius (2021), “Rethinking Environmentalism and Apocalypse: Anamorphosis in The Book of Enoch and Climate Fiction,” Religions12(8):620. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12080620
• Lear, Jonathan (2006), Radical Hope. Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Moltmann, Jürgen (1979), The Future of Creation, trans. Margaret Kohl, London: S.C.M. Press.
• Stengers, Isabelle (2015), In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism, trans. Andrew Goffey, Lüneburg: Open Humanities Press.
• Walsh, Sylvia (2009), Kierkegaard: Thinking Christianly in an Existential Mode, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

In this first episode of our mini-series on religion and climate change, we host Dr Tobias Müller (University of Cambridge) to talk about the role religious communities play in climate change activism. Reporting from his research with Extinction Rebellion (XR) and at COP26, Tobias talks about the many points of convergence between spirituality and climate activism and highlights how religious communities and their heritage can become crucial resources in the fight for a just, carbon-neutral future. 

Music: Alustrat by Blue Dot Sessions

Bio

Tobias Müller is Affiliated Lecturer at the Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS), College Research Associate at King’s College, University of Cambridge, and Research Fellow at The New Institute, Hamburg. Previously, he was postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs (ISGA) at Leiden University and Junior Research Fellow at the Woolf institute, Cambridge. His main research interests include political and social theory, decolonial and feminist theory, secularism and religion, masculinities and extremism, and the politics of climate change. His recent work was published in Political Theory, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Social Compass, Religion, State and Society, Review of Faith & International Affairs, Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Politikwissenschaft / Comparative Politics and Governance and Nature.

References

• De la Cadena, Marisol (2015) Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice Across Andean Worlds. Durham: Duke University Press. 
• Ellingson, Stephen (2016) To Care for Creation: The Emergence of the Religious Environmental Movement. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Escobar, Arturo (2016) “Thinking-feeling with the Earth: Territorial struggles and the ontological dimension of the epistemologies of the south.” Revista de Antropología Iberoamericana 11: 11–32.
• Federici, Silvia (2018) Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons. Oakland: PM Press. 
• Ghosh, Amitav (2016). The Great Derangement. Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Chapter three.
• Latour, Bruno (2017). Facing Gaia. Eight Lectures on the New Climactic Regime. Cambridge: Polity. Particularly lectures three, five, six.
• Müller, Tobias (2020) “People of Faith are Allies to stall Climate Change.” Nature, 592, 9.
• Tsing, Anna (2005). Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton: Princeton University Press.