FREE PUBLIC EVENT: The Hamilton Science Faith Forum and the CSCA present a lecture by Elisabeth Gedge (Associate Professor in McMaster Philosophy Dept.).
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Living Entanglement and Revisionist Ecotheology
Religious engagement in efforts to confront our ecological crisis are hampered by longstanding theological understandings of non-human nature. A deconstruction of common religious ecospiritualities reveals the positioning of the non-human on the lower end of a value hierarchy of being and on the “underside” of value dualisms such as the sacred and the profane, the transcendent and the immanent, the “other worldly” and the embodied. Such underlying dualistic logic defeats the project of recruiting common religious spiritualities to transform our ethical and political relationship to the more-than-human world. Elizabeth A. Johnson’s Ask the Beasts: Darwin and the God of Love (Bloomsbury, 2014) is an example of a recent ecotheology that critiques the hierarchical ontology of being and the underlying ethic of dominion/stewardship characteristic of traditional Christian understanding. In this presentation Elisabeth Gedge considers the theological and ethical success of Johnson’s revisionist ecotheology.
Elisabeth Gedge, MTh, PhD is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at McMaster University, where she teaches courses in Advanced Bioethics and Applied Ethics. She earned a Master of Theology degree from Newman Theological College in Edmonton, where she also taught in the area of science and religion. Her research interests include Feminist Bioethics, Philosophy of Law, Philosophy of Religion, and Environmental Philosophy. (more)