Carrie B. Dohe (MESH Research Fellow)
Juli 1, 2025 | 12.00 – 13.00 | GSSC, 3.03
(Classen-Kappelmann-Str. 24, 3rd floor, 50931 Cologne)
In this talk, Dr. Carrie Dohe discusses her book in progress, The Greening of Religions: Unlocking the Potentials of Religions for Nature Conservation. Religious communities are not environmentalist organizations, nor are most religious actors well-trained in the modern, scientific arenas of nature conservation, environmentalism, climate change mitigation and sustainability. They are, like all of us, also embedded in a highly globalized, urbanized world that is also increasingly multi-religious and socially polarized. Some religious doctrines also appear antithetical to environmentalism, displaying an anthropocentric view of the human-nature relationship, rather than a more biocentric and presumably more conservationist orientation. Dr. Carrie Dohe will discuss these issues, before describing some of the interpretive strategies religious actors use to align their traditional teachings and practices with ecological principles, focusing especially on movements in Germany. She will then dive more deeply into her research on the German federally-funded project “Religions for Biological Diversity,” which problematizes the scholarly typologies of anthropocentric-biocentric religions and reveals both important potentials and significant stumbling blocks for urban religious communities who wish to “go green.”