Religion and Climate Change

Abstract

Understanding the cultural dimensions of climate change requires understanding its religious aspects. Insofar as climate change is entangled with humans, it is also entangled with all the ways in which religion attends human ways of being. Scholarship on the connections between religion and climate change includes social science research into how religious identity figures in attitudes toward climate change, confessional and constructive engagements of religious thought with climate change from various communities and traditions, historical and anthropological analyses of how climate affects religion and religion interprets climate, and theories by which climate change may itself be interpreted as a religious event. Responses to climate change by indigenous peoples challenge the categories of religion and of climate change in ways that illuminate reflexive stresses between the two cultural concepts.