Biography
Katherine Tarrant is a third-year doctoral student of religious ethics at the University of Virginia. Her research interests emerge at the intersection between ecological ethics and the Catholic Social Teaching tradition, where she explores interspecies relationality, contemporary ecotheologies, and traditional constructions of humanity vs. animality. She hails from the Willamette River Basin, and she is an alumna of Yale Divinity School.
Paper Abstract
The looming threat of anthropogenic climate change is the most pressing peril of our time; nevertheless, many who live under the provisional protections of power and affluence stand motionless before the advancing storm, eyes closed and backs turned in willful ignorance or fear. These complex forms of climate denialism are a threat unto themselves, and a moral quandary which must be addressed if we are to make progress in the actual work of mitigating ecological destruction. Fortunately, this is far from our first collective struggle to reckon with shared guilt and sorrow in the face of crisis. If we wish to learn how to grieve well and push beyond our present ethical paralysis, we may look to unique insights and tools offered by liberation theologians deeply engaged with questions of social sin and the spiritual pursuit of reconciliatory justice. This presentation will explore the problems of climate denialism and cognitive dissonance through the lens of theologian Dorothee Soelle's Against the Wind: Memoir of a Radical Christian and the Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance. Drawing on Soelle's vision of a "mystical journey for today," I will argue that her approach to the experience of shame, the cultivation of amazement, and the "turn" towards ego-lessness offer a roadmap through the intrapersonal reconciliation of fear and grief into active, moral resistance against ecological destruction.