Biography
Ava Randel is a third year MDiv candidate at Princeton Theological Seminary. She earned her Bachelor's in Religion with a minor in social work from Pepperdine University in 2020. Her research interrogates Christian nationalism in the United States and its methodologies of radicalization through lenses of ethics, moral theology, and political theory. She works for Princeton Seminary's Center for Theology, Women, and Gender and provides pastoral care as a psychiatric hospital chaplain. She is aiming to continue her education in applied ethics.
Paper Abstract
What does Christian theological discourse have to offer a movement which it has neglected for far too long? What new voice can it offer which has not already joined the conversation? In dialogue with necessary voices which elucidate the Christian ethical imperatives for creation-care and for the repentance of Western Christianity's privileged perpetrators of climate violence, I add this one; in this paper, I demonstrate how Christian theology's hamartiological vocabulary is a valuable addition to conceptual discourses on activism, culpability, and change-making, particularly regarding anthropogenic climate change. Employing work from Ryan Darr, Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, and other scholars, I first lay a brief theological groundwork of sin. Utilizing social and structural conceptions of sin enables this theological discourse to nuance culpability rather than indiscriminately level the moral-responsibility playing field and to highlight the reality of interconnectedness of all human and more-than-human creatures. Next, drawing on both Christian tradition and interdisciplinary modern scholarship, I propose a theological framework of human finitude. This finitude, both moral and amoral, does not exonerate human beings from our responsibility to atone for and combat anthropogenic climate change; rather, it takes seriously our roles in this process and hones our methodologies of doing so. Finally, I explore how this sin-talk illuminates ways forward for us. This future hope is tempered by the insidious reality of sin and grounded in a realistic understanding of finitude, which nuances the culpability of people occupying differing social locations. In all, this paper illustrates how understandings of sin and finitude strengthen human moral agency in the face of pervasive decision paralysis, overwhelm, and structural havoc.