By Grace Tesoro, Staff Writer
Three Susquehanna faculty discussed their experiences with religion’s relevance in the age of climate change in a conversation hosted by Sustainability Coordinator Derek Martin on Nov. 12.
The guests included Director of Jewish Life Eli Bass, Chaplain Scott Kershner and Department Head of Physics Samya Zain.
As curator, Martin supplied the panel with questions regarding their religion and how it ties into being environmentally aware.
Martin also encouraged the panel to discuss if there were any barriers that would hinder their beliefs regarding the two ideas.
Kershner was the first to share about his religious background: “I am a Lutheran pastor,” he said. “For me, faith and spirituality has always been deeply tied with experiences in wild places. The concept of God has never made much sense to me outside of engaging with the cycles and seasons of the world. I’ve always had a passion for the natural world.”
Bass shared about his Jewish upbringing in a relatively minority Jewish community and how he found a passion for the environment through it. He described his first job out of college teaching Jewish environmental education.
“We would see most students who are in Liberal Jewish day schools, where they would receive an immersive environmental experience while thinking about their Jewish identity and thinking about it through a nature lens,” Bass said.
“In this experience, the idea of a faith in God that is naturecentered came to me and made practical sense to me. I fell in love with environmentalism and thought about how I could protect the Earth,” Bass continued.
Zain gave insight about religion and the environment from the perspective of a Muslim and a scientist and the challenges she faced with these two identities.
“In my head, my identity is very clear, but I sometimes struggle to explain things to different people,” Zain said. “Somehow, I came to this conclusion that as a Muslim it is not about what I do, it’s who I am. I can choose to be both a Muslim and a scientist.”
“It is very hard to say where Islam is versus where our culture is,” Zain continued. “We are a very conserving community, we are desert people. We are people with little resources, so whatever resources we have, we hoard. We do not waste them. We conserve by necessity. We must do it, because we don’t have enough. But sometimes that’s not a bad thing. It is in us, to conserve whatever we can. For us, we have to save the world we are given.”
Martin asked the panel about the narrative that pits religion against science, if they thought there was an inherit conflict between the two notions and, from their experiences, how these two things connect.
To Zain, there are no contradictions between science and Islam because they have had many connections throughout history.
“If you look at a thousand years of history, we had hospitals in Baghdad and Iraq and all those countries where those hospitals had surgical units and centers for disease control. These were hospitals that were built in cities to cater to people a thousand years ago. People were doing scientific research back then,” Zain said.
Kershner also said that he does not see a conflict between the two ideologies, and in fact sees a “deep congruence between a religious and spiritual sensibility and a scientific one.”
“Every religion that I know anything about is something of a call to humility … Science is also a call to humility,” Kershner said. The panel agreed that the two concepts can work together cohesively to make the environmental movement bigger.
“Religious leaders have a great responsibility in that regard to communicate the message that there is no planet B where we can turn to. So, we need to protect the one we have now,” Zain said.
Martin noted that while there are cases of religion being used as an argument against climate change, there is also great opportunity in climate change activists engaging with religious groups to better organize people around a moral framework.
“Millions of people go to a religious building each week and listen to someone they have faith and trust in,” said Martin. “Those are my two motivations for this discussion: How can we use these already established networks to find a common ground between science and religion?”
