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Graduate Conference in Religion and Ecology
Yale Divinity School, Old Refectory
409 Prospect Street, New Haven, CT 06511, United States
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The theme of this year's conference is "Creation & Preservation." This conference will feature keynote speaker Mark Cladis, Brooke Russell Astor Professor of the Humanities at Brown and Chair of Brown's Religious Studies Department. We are also pleased to welcome acclaimed musician Henry Jamison, whose intensely lyrical, ecologically-inspired songs boast up to 91 million streams on Spotify, who will play an acoustic set at our closing reception. We are thrilled to spotlight 24 student presenters from universities around the world, alongside four workshops and a gallery of artistic works. This is an in-person conference, with the exception of two student presenters from abroad who will present over Zoom.
Creation & Preservation:
By creation we mean many things: the land, Turtle Island, erets (הארץ), the cosmos, the Word, the biosphere, the environment. But also, creativity, art, and innovation. Preservation we understand as conservation, yes: how do we keep the ravages of climate change from destroying landscapes and ecosystems; how do we manage land and agriculture; how do we relate human life to the more-than-human world? But in its desire to keep things the same, the theme of preservation must also acknowledge the element of time. We can see it not just as an effort to halt progress, but as sustenance, life in its constant flux, the living love of transient things which brings about the need to steward. How are human theologies or cosmologies related to the land on which we live? What views and methods allow us to relate wisely and compassionately to interdependent life systems? What are the implications of preservation and conservation, as opposed to or hand in hand with innovation?
Food Provided (Breakfast (light continental fare), coffee and tea, lunch, closing reception.
Vegetarian, vegan, and gluten-free options will be provided; please specify your requirements below. For anyone whose dietary restrictions we are unfortunately not able to meet, a student kitchen is available. )
Where
Yale Divinity School, Old Refectory
409 Prospect Street, New Haven, CT 06511, United States
Speakers
Mark Cladis
Mark Cladis, the Brooke Russell Astor Professor of the Humanities at Brown University, has three academic homes: the Department of Religious Studies, the Center for Environmental Humanities, and Native American and Indigenous Studies. His work is at the intersection of political, religious, and environmental thought, and is as likely to engage poetry and literature as philosophy and critical theory. Environmental justice and Indigenous ecology are prominent in his work. He has recently published In Search of a Course, and his newest book, Radical Romanticism: Democracy, Religion, and the Environmental Imagination, is in the production stage at Columbia University Press.
Keynote address: Creating and Preserving amid the Catastrophic: the Role of Receptivity in Worldmaking and Creativity in Worldfinding
Addressing his audience as storytellers, worldmakers, and world-preservers in the context of catastrophe, Mark Cladis will ask: What stories will you tell? What worlds will you build? What worlds will you preserve? Storytelling and worldmaking are simultaneously forms of creation and forms of receptivity. Creation requires receptivity even as receptivity requires creation. Preservation—a form of creation—belongs to the work of renovating worlds. The process of renovation requires knowing how to discard and how to preserve from the past for the sake of building futures. Creation and renovation are never creation ex nihilo. And both are ultimately forms of co-creation with such agents as ancestors and presences of the more-than-human. This presentation will largely draw from Romantic and Indigenous sources.
Henry Jamison
Henry Jamison is a Vermont-based singer-songwriter whose intensely lyrical, ecologically-inspired compositions were once lauded by Big Thief's Adrianne Lenker as "songs sing me through mazes of my own sensuality and sadness, help me to feel less alone in the journey to understand myself more deeply and to face gaping wounds." He can be found on Spotify here.
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