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.