One of the many wonderful programs of the CFV is the annual Butler Seminar on Religion and Global Affairs, which has been presented by the CFV along with the Religion program for nearly 25 years. Each year a Religion professor directs the Seminar on a topic of contemporary global significance. In the past we have had Seminars on Religion and Science, Religion and Freedom of Speech, Religion and Immigration, Religion and Race, and Religion and Trans Lives. This year’s Seminar, which I am directing, is on the topic of Religion and Ecology.

The CFV Seminar takes place over four evenings throughout the year, featuring public lectures by scholars and activists from across the country and in some cases around the world, each bringing their own unique expertise to the topic of that year’s Seminar. In addition to the public lectures there is also a concurrent 300-level Religion course open to students from each of Butler’s six colleges. The course meets for three hours on the Saturday morning before the public lectures, and the students also join the speakers and local guests for dinner and conversation before the lectures. Each director of the Seminar runs their courses differently, but for my course the students read a book related to the topic of the session, post discussion questions and responses online, and then write a seminar paper exploring the themes of the text and the session. On Saturday morning we have deep and far-ranging conversations together on the themes of the text and the session, each student bringing their own unique viewpoint to these challenging topics. After the public lectures the students write a reflection on what they learned during the public lectures and the conversations with the speakers, and these papers in particular affirm the that CFV Seminar is a rich and rewarding experience for Butler students!

This past Tuesday evening was the first of our four public sessions for this year’s Seminar. The title of this session was “The Places that Move Us: Ecology as a Vocation.” Our keynote speaker was Dr. Laurel Kearns, Professor of Ecology, Society, and Religion at Drew Theological School in Madison, New Jersey. She is an expert on Religion and Ecology and is a co-founder of the Green Seminary Initiative. In addition to Dr. Kearns’s keynote we also heard from two respondents. The first was Dr. Murat Eyuboglu, a documentary filmmaker and artist-in-residence at National Sawdust, who recently made a film on the Colorado River and is currently making a film on the Amazon River. The second respondent was Dr. Travis Ryan, chair of the Biological Sciences Department at Butler and an expert on urban ecology. For the class meeting before the lectures, students in the course read and discussed Annie Dillard’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

The question for this first session of the Seminar was a simple one: what are the places that have moved us, shaped us, and inspired us to do the work of conservation, environmental activism, and ecojustice? What experiences of nature have we had in our lives that have compelled us to care for the Earth, its creatures, and its ecosystems? And in what sense is that work a vocation, a calling?

For myself, there is a clear answer to these questions. I grew up in a small, rural county in southcentral Pennsylvania where the bonds with nature ran very, very deep and still do to this day. Growing up in Perry County, it was impossible to ignore the rhythms of the seasons, the patterns of agriculture, the presence of animals all around us, and the beauty of the natural world. We learned how to identify countless species of plants, mammals, birds, insects, fish, and fungi, which we regularly harvested for our own use in gardens, lakes, rivers, creeks, fields, and woods. I learned to love and respect nature from a very early age, first by playing in the woods behind my house and the creek across the road, then by learning how to identify plants and trees, and later by learning how to fish and how to hunt. In the summers I worked on a farm and in the family garden, and in the falls and springs I hunted and fished, always eating whatever we killed. Nature was a familiar companion to us, but we never forgot that it was not our friend. It had its own patterns and it was far stronger than us. In many ways we were dependent on it for so much of our lives, which is a relationship I have palpably felt weaken since moving to the city of Indianapolis.

At the same time, I was being raised in the Lutheran church, where I learned about the God who created the universe and everything in it, who at the end of Genesis 1 pronounces all that exists to be “very good.” I learned to appreciate everything in the world as a good gift of a loving God and to see reflections of God’s care and God’s wisdom in the natural world all around me. I was fascinated by the lessons I learned in nature and seriously considered a career as a Wildlife Conservation Officer with the Pennsylvania Game Commission until I realized that studying the sciences required significant competency in mathematics, which was the end of that road for me! Instead, I became a theologian and now I focus on different aspects of nature, still with the same love and respect and awe for the good world God so loves.

In the Seminar on Tuesday evening, our three speakers spoke of their own deep love of nature and reflected on their commitment to conservation and ecojustice as a vocation, a calling. Dr. Kearns spoke with great passion about her upbringing on Sanibel Island off the Gulf Coast of Florida. She shared that she began her undergraduate studies as a student of ecology before falling in love with sociology and the study of religion. But to this day she spends much of her academic energies at the intersection of religion and ecology, believing that we are called to love the Earth, its creatures, and its ecosystems, and to neglect or abuse any one part is to neglect and abuse the whole.

Dr. Eyuboglu spoke of his calling as a filmmaker, his passion for connecting people with beautiful and majestic places, and the people who live there, as a call to action, to protect these places before they are lost forever. He invited us to consider the dangers to these places based on human activity and our failure to think holistically about our use of land and water. He took us (metaphorically) down the Colorado River, through the Grand Canyon, to the Salton Sea, and finally to the delta, a once-thriving ecosystem teeming with life and healthy human settlements but now arid and all but abandoned due to our misuse and abuse of the Colorado River. Through his films, Dr. Eyuboglu hopes to inspire us to care more deeply about these natural places in order to protect and nurture them and to encourage us to think more intentionally about how to live lightly, responsibility, and reverently on the Earth.

Dr. Ryan spoke of the ordinary places that have become extraordinary simply because someone noticed them, cared for them, and loved them. He spoke of the leaps forward in botany thanks to research done at the Indiana Dunes, of the astonishing breakthroughs in tropical ecology at the Smithsonian Research Station in Panama, and of the important work being done in a small corner of South Carolina that reverted to wilderness after a nuclear reactor was decommissioned. None of these places is inherently more interesting than any other place; they just happen to be places where someone thought to ask important questions. Each of these places is now protected, thanks to someone convincing others to notice them and to care about them. He asked us to consider the relationship between questions and place: what questions are we compelled to ask in particular places? How might our own place become extraordinary simply by our having noticed it and loved it? To emphasize this point he shared a quote from Aldo Leopold: “The weeds in a city lot convey the same lesson as the redwoods.” As an urban ecologist, Dr. Ryan closed our evening with a call to love whatever places we happen to find ourselves, whether or not we consider them to be “nature.” Nature is all around us, from the overgrown empty lot down the street to the field of corn or soybeans out in the country to the vast expanses of Lake Michigan, and everywhere in between. And if we truly want to love a place, we must first really get to know it, because we cannot love what we do not know.

In a culture where many people assume that religion and science are eternally at war, Tuesday’s seminar was a refreshing and timely reminder that each of us, whatever our perspective, is pursuing the same basic goal: we want to discover a passion, we want to find something to love, we want to make meaning out of our lives, we want to make a lasting difference. For many of us, those goals are inspired by religion, but for many others they have different inspirations. When we focus on what we have in common rather than what divides us, when we remember that we share so many of the same basic hopes and dreams, we are reminded that we are all in this world together, that we all inhabit the same beautiful, fragile planet as our only home. And we should probably get serious about protecting it while there’s still time.

Brent Hege

CFV Scholar in Residence and Instructor of Religion