Religion and Global Challenges Cambridge Interfaith Programme

Cambridge Interfaith Programme Manager Dr Iona Hine interviews Professor Laurie Zoloth about her recent book, Ethics for the Coming Storm. The conversation was recorded via Zoom in June 2024 and is now included as an extension to the Religion and Climate Change miniseries.
About the guestLaurie Zoloth is Margaret E Burton Professor of Ethics at the University of Chicago and former Dean of Chicago’s Divinity School. She has served as President of the American Academy of Religion, President of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities, and Vice President of the Society for Jewish Ethics. Professor Zoloth was also a founding board member for the International Society for Stem Cell Research, the Society for Neuroethics, and the Society for Scriptural Reasoning. She holds a Life Fellowship at Clare Hall, Cambridge.
About the bookEthics for the Coming Storm: Climate Change and Jewish Thought (2023) was published by Oxford University Press.
How can we come to understand our existence on this earth, surrounded by air and light and water, while living in a place we deliberately and carelessly abuse, where resources are becoming scarce, and where the well-being and basic health of our neighbors is threatened?
Debates about environmental issues have largely been driven by the language of economics and political power. They have become both deeply divisive and symbolic, turning differing truth claims and moral appeals into signs of identity. This discourse has utterly failed to change the human behavior or political and economic structures necessary to face global warming head on.
In Ethics for the Coming Storm, Zoloth turns to another language, found in the texts and traditions of Jewish thought—the language of Scripture, the Talmud, and philosophy of Judaism—which, she contends, offers a different kind of argument for such a change. The traditions, histories, and texts of Jewish thought, Zoloth claims, address precisely the sort of existential crisis that we now face, and thus deepen and enrich our public discourse about what to do, and who to be.
ReferencesThe following is a non-exhaustive list of persons referred to during this episode.
Bill McKibben (1960–)
Author of The End of Nature (1989), the first general audience book about climate change billmckibben.com/bio.html
Emmanuel Levinas (1905–1995)
In the opening chapter of Ethics for the Coming Storm, Zoloth summarises Levinas as follows: “The act of ethics, for Levinas, is the moment of recognition of the plight of the Other, and it is the phenomenological event of this recognition that he teaches ... prior to the recognition of the Other, the self is not fully constituted or called into being.” See further: plato.stanford.edu/entries/levinas/
Fritz Haber (1868–1934)
Winner of the 1918 Nobel Prize in Chemistry recognising his innovative Haber-Bosch process used to synthesise ammonia for agriculture.
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
Exiled from Nazi Germany, Arendt became a highly influential political philosopher. After introducing Arendt, Zoloth summarises: “For Arendt, the actions of citizens in public are the actions that define them as individuals with particular, irreplaceable identity, for in the social what matters is not their being, but their social role, and as consumers or producers, they are, like their products, completely replaceable, expendable. Agency in public allows for the defining acts of freedom and equality that are critical to our humanity.” See also a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arendt/index.html" rel="noopener noreferrer"...

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.li...

In this first episode of our mini-series on religion and climate change, we host Dr Tobias Müller (University of Cambridge) to talk about the role religious communities play in climate change activism. Reporting from his research with Extinction Rebellion (XR) and at COP26, Tobias talks about the many points of convergence between spirituality and climate activism and highlights how religious communities and their heritage can become crucial resources in the fight for a just, carbon-neutral future. 
Music: Alustrat by Blue Dot Sessions
Bio
Tobias Müller is Affiliated Lecturer at the Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS), College Research Associate at King’s College, University of Cambridge, and Research Fellow at The New Institute, Hamburg. Previously, he was postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs (ISGA) at Leiden University and Junior Research Fellow at the Woolf institute, Cambridge. His main research interests include political and social theory, decolonial and feminist theory, secularism and religion, masculinities and extremism, and the politics of climate change. His recent work was published in Political Theory, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Social Compass, Religion, State and Society, Review of Faith & International Affairs, Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Politikwissenschaft / Comparative Politics and Governance and Nature.
References
De la Cadena, Marisol (2015) Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice Across Andean Worlds. Durham: Duke University Press. Ellingson, Stephen (2016) To Care for Creation: The Emergence of the Religious Environmental Movement. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Escobar, Arturo (2016) “Thinking-feeling with the Earth: Territorial struggles and the ontological dimension of the epistemologies of the south.” Revista de Antropología Iberoamericana 11: 11–32.Federici, Silvia (2018) Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons. Oakland: PM Press. Ghosh, Amitav (2016). The Great Derangement. Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Chapter three.Latour, Bruno (2017). Facing Gaia. Eight Lectures on the New Climactic Regime. Cambridge: Polity. Particularly lectures three, five, six.Müller, Tobias (2020) “People of Faith are Allies to stall Climate Change.” Nature, 592, 9.Tsing, Anna (2005). Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

In this third instalment of our mini-series on Living with Religious Difference, we talk to Dr Andrew Bush (Cracow University of Economics) about the way in which pious and not so pious Muslims in Iraqi Kurdistan craft everyday lives together. During our conversation, we delve into the everyday as a site of exploring religious difference and consider how poetry becomes a way of engaging with alterity, whether Christian, Muslim, or other. 
Music: ‘Ebasî Kemendî: Gelawej, Refîq Chalak: Diyarm Deyrî ‘Îshqe 
Bio
Andrew Bush completed a PhD in anthropology at Johns Hopkins University in 2014, and then held teaching and research positions at New York University Abu Dhabi until 2019. When the podcast was recorded, he was a Visiting Fellow in Harvard Law's School's Program on Law and Society in the Muslim World, and now as the podcast is released, he is a Research Fellow at the Cracow University of Economics. His work has appeared in American Ethnologist, the Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, and the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to the Anthropology of the Middle East. His book, Between Muslims: Religious Difference in Iraqi Kurdistan was published in 2020 with Stanford University Press.
References 
Atmaca, Metin (2021). "Negotiating Political Power in the Early Modern Middle East: Kurdish Emirates between the Ottoman Empire and Iranian Dynasties (Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries)." In Cambridge History of the Kurds, ed. Hamit Bozarslan, Cengiz Gunes, and Veli Yadirgi, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Benjamen, Alda ed. (2020). "Narratives of coexistence and pluralism in northern Iraq" Special Issue of the Journal of Contemporary Iraq & the Arab World, no. 14. Bush, Andrew (2020). Between Muslims: Religious Difference in Iraqi Kurdistan, Stanford: Stanford University Press.Ghaderi, Farangis, Clémence Scalbert Yücel, and Yasar Hassan Ali, (2021). Women's Voices from Kurdistan: A Selection of Kurdish Poetry, London: Transnational Press.Uşşaklı, Kerem Can (2002). "Securitizing Citizenship and Policing Security in Iraqi Kurdistan,’ MERIP 295.

For the second episode of our mini-series on Living with Religious Difference, I talked to Dr Anoush Suni (Northwestern University) about her research on the reverberations of the historic Armenian presence in the lives of contemporary Kurdish communities in eastern Anatolia. Together we explore how the memory of the Armenian past lives on within Kurdish communities, how legacies of state violence materialize in ruins and treasures, and we discuss how Armenian religious sites take on new meaning within Kurdish life worlds.
Music: Balık by Collectif Medz Bazar (with special thanks)
Bio
Anoush Tamar Suni is currently the Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University. Previously, she was a Manoogian Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Armenian Studies Program and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. She earned her PhD in anthropology from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2019. For her doctoral dissertation, entitled “Palimpsests of Violence: Ruination and the Politics of Memory in Anatolia,” she spent over two years (2015-2017) in the region of Van, in southeastern Turkey, conducting ethnographic research. She is currently working on her book project, which investigates questions of memory and the material legacies of state violence in the region of Van with a focus on the historic Armenian and contemporary Kurdish communities. Her research interests include state and intercommunal violence, memory, materiality and landscape, cultural heritage, space and place, and political and historical anthropology in Turkey, Armenia, Kurdistan, and the broader Middle East.
References
Biner, Zerrin Özlem. 2020. States of Dispossession: Violence and Precarious Coexistence in Southeast Turkey. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Darici, Haydar. 2011. “Politics of Privacy: Forced Migration and the Spatial Struggle of the Kurdish Youth.” Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies 13 (4): 457–74.Leupold, David. 2020. Embattled Dreamlands: The Politics of Contesting Armenian, Kurdish and Turkish Memory. New York: Routledge.Navaro, Yael. 2020. “The Aftermath of Mass Violence: A Negative Methodology.” Annual Review of Anthropology 49 (1): 161–73. Parla, Ayşe, and Ceren Özgül. 2016. “Property, Dispossession, and Citizenship in Turkey; or, The History of the Gezi Uprising Starts in the Surp Hagop Armenian Cemetery.” Public Culture 28 (3 80): 617–53.Tambar, Kabir. 2016. “Brotherhood in Dispossession: State Violence and the Ethics of Expectation in Turkey.” Cultural Anthropology 31 (1): 30–55. von Bieberstein, Alice. 2017. “Treasure/Fetish/Gift: Hunting for ‘Armenian Gold’ in Post-Genocide Turkish Kurdistan.” Subjectivity 10 (2): 170–89.

In this first episode of our new series on Living with Religious Difference, our guest is Dr Tilmann Heil who talks about his research with Muslim Senegalese migrants in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Together, we consider how religion may function as a moral infrastructure that allows navigating a world where different communities, beliefs, and convictions meet. Tilmann outlines how his interlocutors position themselves within their new lifeworlds and how religion becomes a key resource for negotiating, taming, and accommodating societal difference..
Music: Sneak by A.A. Alto; Kiss And Tell (breezy bossa nova) by Keshco
Bio
Tilmann Heil is a Postdoctoral Investigator at Maria Sybilla Merian Centre Conviviality-Inequality in Latin America - Mecila - and Principal Investigator at the Global South Studies Center at University of Cologne. In his current ethnographic research with West African and Southern European migrants in Rio de Janeiro, he inquires into how migrant newcomers value and evaluate difference within complex urban assemblages characterized by intersectional hierarchies and deep inequality. In his ethnography Comparing Conviviality. Living with Difference in Casamance and Catalonia (Palgrave, 2020) that derives from earlier work in Senegal and Spain, he has conceptualized conviviality as a process of interaction, negotiation, and translation from which forms of minimal and fragile sociality emerge. Across various spaces bordering the Atlantic, Tilmann has continuously addressed ethical reflections on, and habitual tactics of, everyday struggles with ethnic, religious, and racial plurality.
References
Heil, Tilmann. 2019. “Muslim - Queer Encounters in Rio De Janeiro: Making Sense of Relative Positionalities.” Ethnography, no. online first: 1-20. doi:10.1177/1466138119859601.Diouf, Mamadou. 2000. “The Senegalese Murid Trade Diaspora and the Making of a Vernacular Cosmopolitanism.” Public Culture 12 (3): 679-702.Puar, Jasbir K. 2007. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham: Duke University Press.Haritaworn, Jin, Adi Kuntsman, and Silvia Posocco, eds. 2014. Queer Necropolitics. London: Routledge.Kane, Ousmane O. 2011. The Homeland Is the Arena. Religion, Transnationalism, and the Integration of Senegalese Immigrants in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press.