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Religion and Justice
Welcome to "Religion and Justice," a podcast brought to you by the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice at Vanderbilt Divinity School.
Hosted by Gabby Lisi (she/they/he) and George Schmidt (he/him/ours), we explore the intersections of class, religion, labor, and ecology, uncovering their implications for justice.
This podcast is a space for investigation, education, and organizing around these intersections. Join us as we engage in thought-provoking discussions with experts, fostering dialogue for actionable change.
Together, we navigate religion, justice, and solidarity for a more equitable future.
Religion and Justice
Climate Changed: Faith, Climate, And The Work Right Here (Podcast Swap)
George and I took a break this holiday season and gave the mic to another organization doing great work: BTS Center's Climate Changed
Climate Changed is The BTS Center’s podcast. Well-crafted, warm, and invitational, Climate Changed explores some of the most pressing questions about faith, life, and climate change.
The hosts of Climate Changed explores honest climate grief, then move toward the work that remains: creating small, connected refuges of courage, kindness, and action. Meg Wheatley’s “islands of sanity” meets Debra Rienstra’s “refugia” to offer practical steps for leaders, neighbors, and faith communities.
• naming the limits of large-scale change
• choosing contribution without attachment to outcomes
• asking what’s needed here and am I the one
• building islands of sanity through dialogue and shared work
• refugia as ecological metaphor for local resilience
• balancing mitigation, adaptation, doom, and hopium
• reconnecting theology, hope, and climate action
• practical next steps for small congregations
• linking local projects across boundaries for strength
• learning from communities long practiced in survival
We would love to hear your thoughts and responses to our conversation. We would also welcome any suggestions you have for this show.
Feel free to email Climate Changed at podcast@theBTScenter.org. Learn about the many resources we share in our regular online programs by visiting theBTScenter.org.
The BTS Center offers theologically grounded programs of spiritual and vocational formation — workshops and retreats, learning communities, book studies, spiritual accompaniment circles, public conversations and rituals, and projects of applied research — all with an intention to cultivate and nurture spiritual leadership for a climate-changed world. The BTS Center believes there is a divine urgency, a sacred calling, to this work, and we invite you to join us.
About Religion and Justice
Religion and Justice is a podcast from the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice at Vanderbilt Divinity School. We explore the intersections of class, religion, labor, and ecology, uncovering how these forces shape the work of justice and solidarity. Each episode offers space for investigation, education, and organizing through conversations with scholars, organizers, and practitioners.
Learn more at religionandjustice.org
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We can create the conditions so people rediscover what it means to be a fully functioning human being rather than a scared human animal.
SPEAKER_00:Hi, my name is Gab from Religion and Justice. I'm one of your hosts. Welcome to today's episode. We're doing something a little bit different today. We've partnered with our colleagues over at the BTS Center in Portland, Maine, and we're sharing an episode from their podcast, Climate Changed, a show that explores faith, life, and leadership in a climate-changed world. It made perfect sense for us to do this episode swap because here at Religion and Justice, we're always asking how religion intersects with class, labor, ecology, and justice. So for the next chunk of this episode, you're actually hearing Climate Changed. And afterward, I'll return with a few reflections on what we heard and how it connects with our concerns. Thanks for listening, and now over to the BTS Center and Climate Changed.
SPEAKER_08:Hosted by me, Nicole Diroff.
SPEAKER_01:And me, Ben Yashua Davis. Climate change features guests who deepen the conversation while also stirring the waters.
SPEAKER_08:The Climate Change Podcast is a project of the BTS Center.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you for joining us for a deep and powerful conversation I had with author, speaker, and teacher Margaret Wheatley. Margaret, or Meg, as she prefers to be called, does not shy away from the harsh realities of climate change and its impacts.
SPEAKER_08:On this show, we seek to maintain the balance between the painful truth of climate change and the meaningful ways we can respond both individually and collectively. After Ben's conversation with Meg, you will hear Ben reflect on what she shared with our special guest, Deborah Reinstra. Deborah serves as professor of English at Calvin College, is the author of the book Refugia Faith, and is a dear friend of the BTS Center.
SPEAKER_01:As always, we'll have a time for grounding, and we will provide you with meaningful and achievable next steps. And I have to say, doing this sort of work around climate change requires grounding in times of centering.
SPEAKER_08:For today's episode, I'm pleased to introduce a song that was created as part of a collaboration between the BTS Center and the Many. The Many is an amazing group of musicians and liturgists who the BTS Center engaged to craft a series of online worship-filled experiences intended to honor collectively our ecological grief and lament. You can find out more about The Many and Lament with Earth in the show notes. And now is this how the world ends by the many?
SPEAKER_05:The smoke fills our lungs. We can't say we didn't stay.
SPEAKER_01:You can access videos and resources from the many and learn more at their website, themanyare.com. I can't remember a pair of conversations I've been more excited to share than the ones you're about to hear right now. I'm speaking with two people who have perhaps most shaped the way I've done my work over the last two years. The first is Margaret Wheatley, a best-selling author who is an absolute icon in the realm of organizational leadership. I remember reading her book, Leadership and the New Science, when I was a young adult, and a couple of years ago encountered Who Do We Choose to Be, a book that challenged me to reframe how I understand the so what of my life and work for the times that we live in. I then had a dialogue about my conversation with Margaret, with Deborah Reenstra, whose book Refugee of Faith better describes the practice of Christianity in a climate-changed world than literally anything I've read. My conversations with both of them continue to shape and challenge me, and I hope they do the same for you as well. Could you paint us a picture of the future world that you hope we live in with as much detail as you want to?
SPEAKER_04:Well, the future world is nothing to be hopeful about whatsoever. And with increasing evidence, I mean, the United Nations just issued their final last frantic, desperate summons to please collaborate among nation states because we are in grave danger in the next few years of approaching 1.5 centigrade temperature rise. But I hang out with a lot of climate scientists, and they're saying, no, no, no, we already passed that. So the future that I see is one of increasing environmental destruction, increasing warfare among nations because we have made the choice so evident with the Ukraine war to militarize against one another in these grand alliances. So there's no possibility of shifting from that. So I'm describing a very terrible future because that's already been set in motion at the planetary, political, and within us personally, what we're experiencing is increased fear, anxiety, and outrage, despair, grief. So that's the cheerful part of me. And the inspiring part is once we face reality, there's such good work to be done. And that work is spiritually based, it's been told to us over and over and over again in all great spiritual traditions. We need to be together. Humans can get through anything as long as we're together. We need to have much more kindness and generosity of spirit. We need to support those who are struggling. Now that's a good life. I mean it's not in Western terms, it's not in global terms of how we define what a good life is, which is about growth, acquisition, having more. But the future is here, and what it is requiring of us is amazing levels of courage to accept it, and then discover what is truly meaningful and joyful work, which is how we are together.
SPEAKER_01:Oftentimes in climate circles, there is this deep fear about telling the truth of our reality for a fear of kind of how people might respond. It has been my experience, however frequently, is that honesty and with that grief and lament are part of productively engaging in the realities that we've been given so that we can come out on the other end in meaningful action.
SPEAKER_04:Exactly, exactly. Denial is what has brought us here. Most people are retreat with their denial into uh these entertainment bubbles, which by the way, distraction, decadence focused on entertainment is what happens with every complex civilization in its last stages. People just withdraw into entitlements and uh self-pleasuring in terms of distractions and entertainment. But what you just described is my is the basis of all of my work. Once you face reality, you can claim really truly meaningful work. You can see what's meaningful, and it's meaningful in the terms of spiritual traditions, not in terms of our modern materialistic world. What I've been recently describing it as is that we're already on a path of contribution. That's been our lives up to this point. Now we have to enter this deep, dreadful darkness. Uh it's a forest of despair, really. But we stay on the path of seeking how can I contribute to what's going on. As we progress through that forest of darkness, what we find, because we do stay on the path of wanting to serve, wanting to make a meaningful contribution, we come out of that darkness. We come out of our being completely disabled by grief and depression and outrage for what's happening. These are all been part of my path. I mean, I'm not speaking abstractly here. We come out of it into a sense of, okay, now I know what's going on and I can define a meaningful contribution for me. And that is filled with promise of a different kind. I mean, more and more I just think I want to sound like a minister, you know, a preacher, because we've been told what's important in life, you know. And now we have to let go of all of those illusory dreams of what made for a meaningful life and find true meaning. And we have to first go through that dark passage and come out in what I experience is as energy, meaning, and many opportunities for joyful interactions with my fellow human beings.
SPEAKER_01:What you share reminds me so much of the understanding of the dark night of the soul, which is it that's it. Right. And we do come to this place where we learn that our commitment to live meaningfully does not have to be connected to outcome, which is really, really hard, I think, for those of us in privileged Western contexts, where oftentimes we can't like detach ethics from outcome. Like the way we prove whether something was efficacious or worthwhile is whether it does the thing that we wanted it to do. So what happens when that's no longer the case? I think you're talking in many ways about what many of us experience when we think about this climate crisis, and there comes this existential moment where we go, oh my goodness, this thing is so much bigger than I am, so much bigger than any amount of power or privilege I could ever amass. So if that's true, then what does it mean to live a meaningful life? What does it mean to do meaningful work in the face of this moment which is shattering my illusions of control? Thank you.
SPEAKER_04:That's it. That's it.
SPEAKER_01:You mentioned that this is something that comes for you from personal experience. I'm wondering if you could tell us a story of a moment where you made this transition from despair to coming out kind of on the other side in connection.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, I can I can identify because I've written about this one particular one. It was when I was working with a spiritual teacher who identified that my major identity was that I was here to save the world. And that sounds terribly grandiose, but I was actually working in very high corridors of power at the time. And I felt I had the right theory and the right training that I could really help change major systems. So this teacher gave me an I don't know, I wouldn't call it an affirmation, I'd call it a de-affirmation, but it was the world will save itself. And she told me, you just repeat this over and over and over again. So I did that, but I didn't believe it. I would say the world will save itself, sure it will. You know, I couldn't take myself out of the formula for saving the world. And then finally I did let go. And then when I announced to my colleagues, several of whom were younger emerging leaders at the time, that I'm not interested in saving the world anymore. I'm interested in doing good work where we are with what we have. And they were outraged. They thought I was um dishonorable, that I was just selfish by withdrawing my passion and purpose from saving the whole world. And it was truly difficult at the time and then liberating, because then what opens is okay, where can I serve? What's going on here? And am I the one to contribute? Those are the two questions I guide everyone who will listen to me, including everyone here, to really approach every situation now with looking around as fully as you can, gain as much information as you can, past your biases, judgments about who people are or what's going on or what's worked in the past, and simply ask, what's needed here? What's needed here if I see as clearly as I can? And then, because there's so many overwhelming needs, you ask the second question, am I in the right place? Am I the right person to contribute to this need right now? So you do some personal discernment about the stability of your life, of your mind, and whether you have enough support to really make an offering. But you do make that offering you already brought up with no expectations. You just know this is at the moment seemingly the best offering. And offering is a critical word for me. We're offering ourselves, we're offering our skills at one level. It's called compassion without ambition. We see what is needed, we don't know if it's going to work, and then so you stay awake as you're doing the work, but it shifts from what do I think I need to feel fulfilled and purpose-filled life to what does the world need from me? And it's not the big world, it's the world of your community, your congregation, your school, your family, your team. And I call those islands of sanity now because we're doing our very best to create sanity, to create the conditions for people to express, to be free of fear, and express, therefore, our best human qualities of generosity, kindness, and creativity and community?
SPEAKER_01:We work with a lot of folks who are pastors in small churches or are small nonprofits who are doing really important work that just oftentimes is experienced as being utterly insufficient for the moment that we're at. I think you've talked some about the orientation, but what sort of kind of skills and daily habits or practices of attention do you recommend for leaders who are in those sorts of situations who are looking to reconnect with that sense of vocation and agency when our culture is trying to kind of pull those things apart?
SPEAKER_04:The first thing is it's all insufficient. It's never enough. We just have to live with that constant sense of sorrow that we can't have more impact, but we can't, but we can turn to where we do have impact. I quote President Teddy Roosevelt quite a lot, who said, Do what you can where you are with what you have. So the first practice is to turn our attention away. This is ironic coming out. Of my mouth because I've had a whole career asking people to pay attention to the larger scene, to the systems, interdependencies going on. And now I'm asking people actually demanding, create an island of sanity where you are with what you have and the people who are there with you. So the first thing is to redirect our attention to what we have and the people who are here. The second thing is to understand that people, when we're engaged in working together on something we care about, then a lot of our disagreements, our biases, our prejudices, our judgments disappear. You put work at the center. You may have to come in and teach good listening. You may have to come in and do a little training about some skill of discernment that's missing. But keep the work at the center, and you don't have to choose the work. You can have people come together and say, okay, what's needed here? Where do we want to put all of our good intentions and our compassion without ambition? What's calling to us within our own community? For me, if we did that, we're not going to change these global systems. There is not a prayer in anywhere that they can be changed. They are massively set off in their own direction. They are emergent systems, and you do not undo what has emerged. It's an impossibility. So they're leading us to our destruction. And it's evident every single day. I define sane leadership as creating the conditions for people to discover or remember that they can be generous, creative, and kind. I mean, we can create the conditions as leaders, no matter how small or mid-sized our island of sanity is, we can create the conditions so people rediscover what it means to be a fully functioning human being rather than a scared human animal in survival need. That work is abundant. I mean, it's if you just get your group together and ask them not what's wrong, but what's possible. And that was a quote that changed my consulting life when I read it in 1987 from Marvin Weisboard. I want to offer it here. He said, I used to go into a system and ask wrong, okay, what's wrong and how can we fix it? Then I realized the right question is what's possible here and who cares? Who cares enough to do the work? So I do think the role of leadership right now is first of all, creating the conditions, extending the invitation, and then being incredibly patient with people's reluctance to show up because people have really withdrawn. And that's a survival behavior that is clearly in our reptilian brains. So we have to calm people down, we have to get them focused on well, what is possible? What do you care about here? And then put them to work using participative processes. There's nothing better than dialogue and conversation for the initial work. And then you have to develop some good planning skills. You have to know where you might possibly have some good benefit from intervening in the system. And then you start where there's passion, interest, need. And then if it doesn't work, you try something else. You try something, you keep experimenting. Everything we do, including our lives, needs to be thought of these days as an experiment.
SPEAKER_07:I'm Autumn Brown, artist, theologian, mother, and freedom worker. And I'm Reverend Nicole Deroff, Associate Director at the BTS Center. This season on Climate Changed, we're asking what it means to live, to love, and to lead in a climate-changed world. You'll hear from spiritual leaders, artists, and healers who are helping us imagine what faithful leadership looks like right now. Leaders like Katie Mears, who works on the front lines of disaster response. Tori Stevens, who believes imagination is our most powerful climate tool. Norma Wong, a Zen master and native Hawaiian leader who invites us to breathe together through collapse. Rabbi Aura Nick Kinkainer, who helps us find holiness in uncertainty. And Francis Weller, who reminds us that grief and love are two sides of the same bridge. Together, these conversations inspire courage, connection, and community. Join us for Climate Change, a podcast from the BTS Center. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or at ClimateChangepodcast.org.
SPEAKER_06:Right.
SPEAKER_01:And fear, and um, oftentimes, and I know sometimes I feel this myself, like, why is it anyone doing anything? Right. And I'm curious for folks who are in that position of deep felt urgency and felt generational betrayal, um, where you find these teachings which um which sound like very good news to me, um, but may sound less like good news to those who are like, well, who's gonna who's gonna step up and fix this? How do you find those land and what do those dialogues look like?
SPEAKER_04:Well, this uh question always comes up because to be a young person in this world is devastatingly terrible. First of all, they're very ill-grounded if they're grounded at all in a clear sense of community, shared identity, shared values. Um, so they they start out ungrounded in most cases, and then they find a new identity. Now, the new identity may be activism, which is appropriate for people into their 20s. I mean, that's where the idealism is resident in any culture, in the young people. It's not where the wisdom is, the wisdom is in the elders in traditional cultures. What I have found is there is no solution here to getting angrier and angrier at demanding that the system be fixed. I've worked with enough young people now that they really do start to see, okay, we're not gonna fix it at the level at which it needs to be fixed, which is global, which is corporate changes in corporate behavior, the end of nationalist self-protective militarism. It's not going to happen. And when they realize that, my my goal is the same as what I just said. Look at your community. First of all, establish community. That's happening in more and more places. I think it's fundamental to be really grounded literally in place with other people. But there's work to be done. I mean, you can you can create good agricultural practices, you can create quality schooling, you can create a deepening sense of practice that gives you a stable mind. But doing that with other people is essential.
SPEAKER_01:I wonder if you might have a blessing or a benediction or a sending forth word you might be able to offer for this conversation and for the people who are listening.
SPEAKER_04:I want to bless all of us that we may open to the world as it is and discover how much it offers us with grace and insight and companionship.
SPEAKER_02:Hi, Ben. Yeah. I'm really excited to be here with you too. I'm a big fan of what you all do at BTS, and I'm just thrilled to be with you today. So I'm a writer and a university professor. My field is English literature and creative writing. And uh I've recently written a book called Refugia Faith, which is a book about climate change and faith, a kind of account of my own journey to figure out what it means to be a person of faith in a time of enormous upheaval and climate change. So I've been playing around with this concept of refugia, which is a biological concept. It's essentially where life endures in times of big disturbance in the living world. Refugia are places where biodiversity can retreat to, persist in, and potentially expand from in the midst of extreme disturbance. When I came across this idea, it immediately struck me as not only a powerful witness to how the natural world survives in a crisis, but a kind of metaphor that we could all think about, especially as people of faith. So I've really been playing with this idea of what would it mean to imagine ourselves as people of faith, as the people of refugia? What if we were to think that our job is to find and nurture refugia, not only in the natural world, but in our human organizations, in our churches and mosques and synagogues, in all of our human social aspects as well.
SPEAKER_01:This concept just immediately came to mind when I was talking with Meg about this understanding of what it means to create islands of sanity when she first said that I went, oh, oh, wait, I've heard of this before. We had there's this, there's this concept called refugia. I'm curious then for you, just as we we begin talking about what Meg shared with us, you know, she talks about what it means to build islands of sanity, as about being these places where you're working where you are with what you have, with the people around you, as you create conditions for them to emerge, and then you extend an invitation for people to join you, and then practice patience as you wait for people to show up. What does it mean to cultivate refugia and where do you see that happening?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, so listening to Meg's conversation too, that islands of sanity, it's a great phrase. And it strikes me that what she's talking about fits the definition of refugee really beautifully, but she's coming at it from a kind of organizational psychology point of view. I think she's really focused on human systems and groups. Refugia is more a biological concept, so it's fun to see those merge, to see the human social idea and the biological idea merge a little bit. What's appealing to people about the idea of refugia is that the minute you know that idea, you start to see them everywhere. People enjoy immediately coming up with examples. Oh, my congregation is a refugial space. Oh, my cottage, you know, that I've cultivated this beautiful garden, and that's my refugial space. Or, oh, this group, this group downtown that meets for people who've struggled with addiction or or something like that, that's a refugial space. So people start to see them everywhere. The idea that those refugial spaces are honorable and important and a kind of survival tactic. That's what really strikes people. They didn't necessarily think, ah, this is a strategy. This is a strategy for living through a time of disturbance. And even just to acknowledge that we're living in this time of enormous upheaval and disturbance and change is really helpful to people. They, I think, often assume, oh, well, I guess this is normal. Why is it so hard? Well, it's because it's a time of upheaval, that's why. The values of growth and bigness and dominance, I think, have come about in the Christian church world for good reasons. I mean, people want to spread the gospel, we want more people to live lives of following Jesus. And so there's like good reasons behind it, but I think we also get into this kind of rut that leads to not the virtues of refugia, but other priorities. Unfortunately, it's very hard on pastors to try to pursue growth for growth's sake and the gigantic capital campaigns for the building, and it takes away from the capacities that a refugial space will build. And I I think Meg talked about that too. She emphasized that leaders should create spaces for generosity and creativity and kindness. And that's a whole different set of priorities for a leader than just to create growth and a kind of affluence, whether you construe that in terms of actual wealth or some kind of church footprint in the community, is just a different set of virtues.
SPEAKER_01:It really is. It's harder to quote grow a church if you're in a context where fewer people think of church as a place to find meaning.
SPEAKER_02:One of the things that really struck me about Meg's conversation was this sense that it it seemed like there was a time in her career where she was really focused on this kind of big-scale change the world work. I found that so impressive and admirable. And I thought about my own life and thought I never ever thought I was in any position to walk the halls of power and change the world. The kind of sense that she's come to that these gigantic systems are never going to change. And I don't know if that's true, but I I hope that's not true. But I she would know more than I would. But this idea that the gigantic systems are never going to change, and instead, you know, we just we focus on doing the work, doing the good work that's aimed at those virtues that we're trying to cultivate in these small islands of sanity or refugial spaces. I guess that just struck me as yeah, that that's always been how my faith practice describes our role. It's fine to be small, it's important to be faithful. That's really the idea behind refugia too. Small is not insignificant. And I think that's another thing that people find encouraging about the whole refugia concept is that it makes that small space that you feel you can be a part of and manage, it makes that not insignificant. There's always the potential to connect and to grow. This sense that the the end game is just the good work itself. And in the end, you know, as she said, it's all insufficient. Our little refugee of spaces, as best we can, we can expand and connect. But really ultimately the the goal is to create those healthy spaces as a survival tactic, but also with this kind of hope that there might be possible expanding and connecting and renewal that comes from these refugio spaces. Her approach reminded me of Mary Untire of Knots, you know, that famous image of the Virgin where you see Mary with this whole you know tangle of knots. The idea is that your job is not to like solve it all, but to look down with a practice, as Andrew Sullivan says, and just work on those knots. That's another metaphor for this, right? Your your role is to just work on those knots where you are with the people you have.
SPEAKER_01:This line that you used, small is not insignificant, to me, is so powerfully liberating. We actually used Meg's book with a group of nonprofit leaders as part of a research collaborative we were leading this past year. We got together to discuss the book and discuss, you know, the way that Chief kind of fronts this whole thing. Everything you do is going to be insignificant, you can't change the world. And it was very interesting to watch the shape of the discussion, where it started in this place of anxiety and fear, but very quickly moved to a place of hope and relief. Here is this burden that our culture has taught us to carry, and now we know we don't have to carry it anymore. We just have to look down and hear words like untie the knots present in our context.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. You know, when it comes to climate change and other issues that we're dealing with now, it's important to sort of balance that that sense of peace around smallness and that sense of focus around refugeo spaces and the kind of agency that we experience in those spaces. I think it's important to balance those with efforts to connect those spaces. So the the kind of small and local scale with the big let's change the world scale, knowing that we're not in control of that, but just to to make those gestures outward, you know, in a biological context, a a refugee space would Have a tendency to want to spread and connect. That's what it would want to do. Whether it succeeds depends on conditions and everything. I wouldn't want to have this sense that we can just turn inward to a kind of quietism and do nothing. I'm just wired to have more like, it's gonna work out, you know, sort of groundless optimism. I think it's just a temperament thing, and it's probably really good that we have people who are more toward the hopium scale of things. You want to be honest and grounded and dealing with facts here, but more toward that scale and also people who are like, yeah, no, it's gonna be bad. We need to adapt. It's probably useful to have people across that spectrum because we really do need to be both mitigating and adapting right now, based on the modeling, you know, the many, many models that we have of the many, many things that can happen in the next decades. It's really important to operate some healthy place on that spectrum between doomism and hopium, and also to operate with a kind of balance between your fight, you know, your local knot that you're untying and trying to connect on this bigger scale. Keep in mind that the knots we're untying are not only practical matters of like working with your local utility to promote community solar, you know, that kind of very practical engineering technology kind of thing. But also these more difficult, more elusive sort of virtue knots of living together as a community, building those capacities of kindness, creativity, and generosity and openness, those are even more difficult. But faith communities are supposed to be good at that stuff. I mean, that's where we can be leaders, you know, and say, yeah, no, this kind of culture of outrage and combatants, that is not what we stand for as faith communities. We want to learn with all of you how to live into our faith commitments better because everybody needs that, not just those of us who are in faith communities, but all of us need to need the kind of moral leadership and example that we are supposed to be providing.
SPEAKER_01:I think that's so true. And one of the things that I note a lot in my work is even working often in mainline and progressive Christian circles, there are many people who will, on the one hand, state that they think the climate change is real, that it's important, that we should do something about it. And then in the very next breath, say, I don't think that my faith or my congregation has anything particular or unique to offer the climate-changed world that we're a part of. There's an extraordinary opportunity for leaders to help congregants connect the theological and spiritual dots between what's going on and the ways, in fact, that the frameworks of our faith and the practices of our faith actually have a lot that's genuinely unique to offer this moment, not in kind of a colonizing way and a, hey, let's all just talk about climate change, and then all the young people are going to come back to church again, sort of way, which is a line that I have actually heard fairly frequently. It's probably true. Yeah, there probably is some truth to that. I've noticed that when you begin engaging with people's lived experience, and certainly climate anxiety is something that I hear universally and really intensely, that people might go, oh, maybe this thing that I thought was as relevant as, you know, grandma's old dusty slippers might um be useful for us. More than that, what I've discovered is that the Christian theology and practice actually is something that can be offered as a gift to the wider climate movement. And I've noted this especially around concepts like hope. The Christian understanding of hope is significantly different than the American understanding of optimism. And normally we think in our culture that optimism and the hope are the same thing, but they're not. So frequently, I want to say, especially to small congregations that have often been taught to look at themselves as kind of a less than in our late-stage consumer capitalist culture, that actually you could have a really, really unique positive vocation to offer your community and your world about what it means to human in this really challenging moment that we're in.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I wonder if it would be helpful for small faith groups, especially not to worry about not being big.
SPEAKER_01:Right, right.
SPEAKER_02:And not to, you know, hand-wring over that, but to say being small is a feature, not a bug. It allows us to practice community in the hard ways and then give ourselves to the larger community. So rather than like trying to drag people in to say, well, we can be the ones who go to the climate march and pray for the young people. I mean, wouldn't that be amazing to think about the inventory of strengths that we have, which I I think we we don't really realize anymore. We've been so worried as I don't know, maybe mainlines and certainly evangelicals about clawing back some kind of cultural dominance, but maybe the the gift is to be small and nimble and agile and to bring that community strength, but also theological strength. And I I think as you say, you know, we just haven't people haven't necessarily been trained to connect the dots there. That was one of the things I was trying to do in Refugia Faith is say, what sort of theological resources have we got? Turns out we've got a lot that are very relevant to this moment. I mean, uh, you can look at the scriptures and notice how often God works through refugia, for one thing, like the Israelites, for example, or even the disciples, is a sort of model where God uses what is hidden and apparently unimportant to do amazing things.
SPEAKER_01:Right. With the key issues going on within the towns and cities in which they're located and are in key supportive roles with the wider movements, especially the climate movement, offering the resources that they have so that people who are engaged in climate from every kind of walk of life, including those who wouldn't profess any faith, can find support and nurture and comfort and wisdom from those who are holding this tradition that I know both of us hold so dear.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. That model is in our scriptures. There's a rich ecological heritage, but we've sort of lost it in our, at least in the American church, in our efforts to be individualistic and um culturally dominant and all of those things when we are trying to bring back some vision of what we were, we're forgetting the gifts that we have to give now. How do church communities find long-term steady and stable ways of bringing climate work into their faith life, among other things? Once again, it's a difference between how can we get people in and what needs healing around here and how can we go out and help. I was struck too by one thing Meg said when she mentioned that young people are ill-grounded in community or identity. And I thought, oof, that that hurts because that's probably true. And I wonder if a smaller church focused more on going out would actually be really helpful. And in a way, more helpful than the large church full of small children. By the way, if you ever go into a church, you know, a couple with small children, if you if you visit a church, people will just go insane for you.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, it's so true.
SPEAKER_02:Right? Have you done this? Oh my gosh, it's funny.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, it and they all love it. And so, like your your three and a half year old is talking loudly, asking questions, running across the back of the sanctuary, disrupting everyone's beloved silence, because it's really weird. People want people want families, but they don't want the conditions in which families would be would be welcome. Um, and so quickly those, oh boy, it's so good to have you turn to me like, oh great. Did you know we have a nursery?
SPEAKER_02:Yes, exactly. And it's true, you know, it is it's a sign of life, it's a sign of the future to have little kids around. So I totally get it.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I do think you point out something really important about youth. I don't feel qualified now to speak for people who, you know, our life experience uh form them in just a very different cultural context than myself as a as a millennial, but I I often look at the stories that my friends who are like in high school share with me, and I go, Oh, oh my goodness, just my heart goes out for these folks who are living in a digital mediated age, which makes being an adolescent so much worse, who feel this sense of generational betrayal as they begin to realize like what the climate crisis is going to mean for them, and then oftentimes lack reference points to make sense of what's going on in a in a in a way that isn't just purely materialist or about power, and then also lack intergenerational relationships beyond their immediate family. And when you often add the tragedy that that um many congregations who are set up in their lineage to actually offer a lot of those things, when you get right down to it, actually aren't that interested in making the changes that would be needed to build authentic relationships.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Yeah, there's a real generational disconnect, as you said, and a and a kind of loss of what is the story that you're trying to live into. I came of age in the 80s, and the story you were trying to live into was basically upward mobility. Everybody was supposed to get an MBA and you know, make lots of money and have a luxurious life. To some extent, the parents of my students now at Calvin University kind of want their young people to live into that story because their parents, they want their kids to be okay. So get a degree that will get you a job so you can support yourself. You know, it's this kind of economic model. On the one hand, the students feel that, and on the other hand, they think, but the world, you know, that just that story seems so inadequate to the world they're growing up in. So this idea of put work at the center that Meg talked about, they have a different view of what that work is. And so you're seeing so much activism with young people now. And it's I think they're they're finding the definition of work to be this work to make things better and to kind of repair. Yeah, I mean, it is kind of a save the world thing, but I also don't think they I think they have a very clear understanding of what they're up against. These gigantic multinational corporations and these gigantic entrenched government systems, they understand their work has to be patient and persistent and together. But you know, that's an emerging story that only some people are catching on to. So I do think there's a real dearth of life story shape for people. And this is where faith can help as well, you know?
SPEAKER_01:That whole phrase you use, the but the world, is I think it's some ways the essence of the struggle I sense for many of my younger friends. There's often this both this intense pressure to take these these inherited expectations about what it means to be successful, and then you put them into conversation with the fact that this good life is being utterly deconstructed in a thousand different ways. And so what is the vocation for for for, I mean, not just for young folks, but for any of us when all these inherited stories we're now finding out just aren't true and aren't feasible anymore.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Yeah. And Meg talked about that too, the giving up the illusory dream, that life that we thought was meaningful, which turned out to have less meaning than we thought it would, you know?
SPEAKER_01:That's really true. And that's for me where a concept like refugia is actually really important because it gives a framework for people to begin to understand what does a life well lived look like?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Well, and you know, the idea of creating and nurturing these refugia spaces, there's going to be disappointments there too. I mean, islands of sanity, refugia spaces. It sounds so fabulous when we're talking about it. As Meg was talking to about leaders who create generosity and kindness. And I had this little Calvinist alarm go off in my head. I don't know, you probably don't have a Calvinist alarm, but I do.
SPEAKER_01:As a Methodist, that is not one of my not one of my issues.
SPEAKER_02:No, you're you're spared that one. My Calvinist alarm basically said, yeah, but you know, people are horrible and depraved. Um, and it's not all gonna be so fabulous in these small communities and islands of sanity, which is true, you know. I mean, small community is hard work, it requires kinosis, you know, the giving of the self, the pouring out of the self. And I'm not a big fan of that myself, I gotta say. So it's easy for me to talk about these things. But yeah, I mean, human human community is hard. Actually, nature community is hard. Not all refugio work, you know, sometimes they just kind of fade out. But the downsides, I think, are worth it when you realize that this can be a really healthy survival tactic. And, you know, one of the things we can do is look to people who've had no choice but to create refugee spaces. I mean, if you think about the civil rights movement, a really good example of working on that local scale while also keeping these big goals in mind. People suffered. I mean, any any kind of work like this is going to require suffering. So I don't want to make it all sound like, yes, the solution to everything is Islands of Sanity or Verpuggia. People who know how to do this can tell us all the hard parts. And and actually they're the they're the people that we have to learn from. The people who have had to survive. So indigenous people and black Americans who've had to survive, had to create safer spaces, you know, not entirely safe, nothing is entirely safe, but safer spaces, places where they could be sane together, places where they could practice joy and gratitude even amid the hard stuff. Places where they could console and comfort each other and get strength for the journey. They are the teachers now. They know what to do. And those of us who've had these delusions of grandeur about our ability to change the world, we're the ones that have to learn now.
SPEAKER_01:Indeed. So, Deborah, I'm wondering for any of our listeners who are wondering what to do next, could you offer a specific next step that they could take in response to this conversation?
SPEAKER_02:People in the climate movement often talk about do what you're good at, do what you love, and figure out a way to connect. So I would say if you're part of a faith community, find some like-minded people in that faith community and find a little very local project and find some other group to connect to so that you've got two things going at once. Something very local and immediate and tangible. A great thing to do is renativize your landscape because it's so tangible, it's easy to do. You can join up with the homegrown national park peoples, they can give you some instructions. So, you know, just dig up some turf and plant some native species, research what needs to be planted where you live. It's just so tangible and you feel like you have the agency and it's fun. And you can do it with little kids or older people, especially expert garden-y people could learn this. Anybody can do that. But then also start to learn about what the issues are in your region, what needs to be healed, and how can you and your faith community help so that you start making those connections across boundaries. We're often so siloed in faith communities, and to make those connections across boundaries, that's where the joy comes because you realize you might feel a little bit lonely in this work, but there are so many other people out there. And if you can just open the door and see those other people out there, it's so encouraging and life-giving. And you can learn some of these capacities that we're trying to build in refugia spaces just by working with other people.
SPEAKER_01:Well, Deborah, I had this impulse that you would be the perfect conversation partner to bring into the dialogue I had with Meg. And indeed, I was right. And I just want to say thank you for bringing your wisdom and your frameworks to this conversation, but also helping us take what could feel like a very kind of heady concept and pull it right down to earth.
SPEAKER_02:It's been a pleasure. Thanks, Ben.
SPEAKER_01:Visit Meg's author page to find out more about her, including a link to the second edition of Who Do We Choose to Be that just came out. You can check out Deborah Reinstra at her author page, her excellent Substack newsletter, and her marvelous podcast, Refugee of Faith. Links to all of these can be found in our show notes. We always share about next steps at the end of our episodes, but if changing the world seems like a comical idea after listening to these conversations, I invite you to narrow your scope to one action you can take. For instance, Meg and Deborah both talk about the difference that we can make when we focus on the small, local, and contextual. Scientists and activists are starting to come to an almost universal agreement that if you want to create a resilient community, you have to start by cultivating relationships. So if you need a place to start, start with your neighbors. My go-to is baking cookies or brownies. If you have a small child in your life, have them decorate the bag that those cookies or brownies go in and bring them over with you. No one is displeased when dessert shows up at their doorstep, and it could be the start of a relationship that may make a big difference for you, for them, and for the place where you live.
SPEAKER_08:I love that image of you, Ben.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you so much for joining us today for this. Episode of a Climate Change Podcast.
SPEAKER_08:We would love to hear your thoughts and responses to our conversation. We would also welcome any suggestions you have for this show.
SPEAKER_01:Feel free to email us at podcast at theBTScenter.org. That's podcast at theBTScenter.org.
SPEAKER_08:Our podcast is produced by Peterson Toscano and is a project of the BTS Center in beautiful Portland, Maine.
SPEAKER_01:Learn about the many resources we share in our regular online programs by visiting theBTScenter.org. That's the BTScenter.org. There you will also find our full show notes in a transcript for today's episode. Take care and may you find faith, life, and love in the midst of our climate-changed world.
SPEAKER_00:Thanks for staying with us. That was the episode from Climate Changed and the BTS Center. I hope it opened up new grooves of thought for you. Maybe around how spiritual leadership, ecological crisis, and justice interrelate in ways that feel urgent but also generative. From our angle at religion and justice, I want to invite you to ask, what does this make possible? What does it demand of us? If you enjoyed hearing this voice and this approach, I encourage you to explore more of climate change. We'll include a link in the bio below. They're doing deeply thoughtful work at the intersection of faith and the climate crisis. On our end, we'll keep returning to ecology, labor, religion, and solidarity, and how we might act in the contours revealed by those intersections. If something in today's conversation stuck with you, I hope you'll sit with it, talk with others, and bring it into your own context. I want to give a big thanks to the BTS Center for this wonderful collaboration, and thanks to you, our listener, for showing up. Until next time, let's keep walking the path to justice together.
SPEAKER_03:And you have to reach out to your friends who think they are making it good and get them to understand that they, as well as you and I, cannot be free in America or anywhere else where there is capitalism and imperialism until we can get people to recognize that they themselves have to make the struggle and have to make the fight for freedom every day, in the year, every year, until they win it.
