Biography
Before coming to YDS, Caroline spent nearly a decade in education working as a teacher, counselor, and program director, and as a staff/faculty organizer and liaison, living in Northern Japan, and in Central Ohio. A lot of her focus and learning so far in seminary has been at the intersections of christian ethics, spirituality, and embodied care for people and planet concurrently. This past summer, Caroline spent several weeks living and working with trappist nuns in the redwoods of California's Lost Coast region, learning greening monastic practices and practices of discernment. She's looking forward to learning from one another's prophetic visions and imaginations for life together in the joy-filled work of affirming and tending life, amidst our particular places and communities.
Paper Abstract
This work examines a few ways of reflecting theology and ethically with practices and dynamics of composting. In the compost pile, we see a defining feature of the meshwork of creaturely life—that all life depends on the metabolizing work bacteria perform, the dance of growth and decay constantly circulating through soil, place, and time. Compost progressions are circular progressions. Thinking theologically with compost, there are various relations, processes, and dynamics, personally and communally, spiritually and ecologically, that we might consider in this dance. In the compost pile we might think with ethical metaphors for the breaking apart of death-dealing logics and structures that define our colonial modernities in which we yet reside, and which need to be strained against and dismantled. To think with compost is to aim at thinking oneself out of certain logics of self-possession, seeking to draw toward life from (or out of) death, looting death toward life even, in community and communion, and at the sites of bodies (plant, animal, microbial) and of land. In the spirit of a compost pile, this work resists singular assertions and conclusions, instead examining just a few of the multivalent meanings that may emerge from reflecting theologically and ethically with the physical and imaginative processes of composting. Drawing upon environmental, feminist, womanist, and postcolonial theologians and ethicists, including Melanie Harris, bell hooks, Emilie Townes, Norman Wirzba, M. Shawn Copeland, Tink Tinker, Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, Willie James Jennings, Wonhee Anne Joh, and Miguel De La Torre; as well as embodied wisdom collected through interviews with lay and religious leaders and environmental practitioners who tend and manage compost piles, major themes of this work include theo-ethical reflections on social and political agitation as part of a liberative, ethical love-praxis; ecomemory, grief, and lament; and prophetic- pastoral practices of hope toward regenerative creation.