Over the past decade or so, Columbia Theological Seminary (CTS) has embarked on a pair of significant and institution-wide projects. One involved taking account of the seminary’s complicity in long histories of racism and injustice in the American South. Toward that end, we supported the publication of books on slavery and anti-black racism in American Presbyterianism, worked with organizations such as the Wabash Center to assess our pedagogical purposes and projects, initiated a Doctor of Ministry track focused on justice — with a particular eye toward race — and, most prominently, shaped a set of “Repairing the Breach” projects that included creating a new staff position focused on communal flourishing and reshaping our practices around the awarding of scholarships, especially with regard to attracting members of historically underrepresented groups.
The second project has been to better integrate wisdom from the natural sciences into our curricula. Thanks, initially, to a substantial grant from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), that project brought leading scientists to campus for invited lectures, funded honoraria for faculty to invite scientists into our classrooms, and enriched the library’s resources in scientific and “science and religion” texts. We were also the second theological institution to host the Smithsonian’s “Human Origins” exhibit on campus.
Perhaps the most prominent way we worked to integrate wisdom from the natural sciences into the life of the institution was to redouble our emphasis on promoting environmental sustainability. Not only have we shaped a Sustainability Commission as an ongoing committee of the seminary, we also showcased our two LEED-gold certified buildings, built out our garden and, through the generosity of a donor, created an annual “Creation Care Sermon Competition,” the winning sermon from which is preached at our annual Earth Day worship service and for which the preacher receives a cash prize. Our work in creation care helped us garner certification from the Green Seminary Initiative in 2018. Further, we hosted the “Just Creation: Shalom for Our Common Home” conference in 2023, which drew hundreds of participants and connected us to over twenty-five partnering organizations. And growing out of that conference, the faculty signed on to “Climate Chaos: A Pedagogical Manifesto,” written by our own William Marcellus McPheeters Professor of Old Testament and PASTCF member, Dr. Bill Brown. In signing on to the manifesto, the faculty commit to, among other things, forwarding the concerns of climate change in our work.
These two projects — pursuit of reparative justice and promotion of natural science — came together in 2024 through another AAAS grant we received. “Seeking Tikkun Olam: Pursuing Climate Justice at Columbia Theological Seminary,” funded by that grant, is now nearing its completion and the seminary is — and hopefully, will be — a different place because of it. Blending our commitments to justice — especially through the lenses of climate justice — with our commitments to science and creation care, the grant allowed us to pursue a number of projects that might otherwise have gone unattended. Moreover, it displayed just how important it is that pursuit of reparative justice and promotion of natural science not be separated.
Integrating sciences in seminary curricula
Our “Seeking Tikkun Olam” grant proposal focused on four areas: Curriculum, Complicity, Community, and Communications. The “curriculum” portion of the grant allowed us to hold a half-day workshop with a leading professor of climate science to educate us in best practices for teaching on climate science in the classroom; it also covered the costs for honoraria that allowed any CTS faculty member to invite a scientist working on climate issues into their classroom. Through this “infusion model” of integrating climate science into diverse courses, we hope our students will see that the concerns of climate change touch on every aspect of human existence and also come to understand how vital it is that science and theology stay in conversation as we enter the Anthropocene.
While the “curriculum” portion of the AAAS grant focused on the classroom, the “complicity” portion focused on the institution as a whole. Thus, a significant chunk of the grant went toward hiring a consultant to do our first greenhouse gas inventory report and, on the basis of it, recommend a climate action plan for our next fifteen years. After all, if the seminary is to meaningfully address matters of climate justice in its curriculum and as an institution, an initial step is to assess how much harm we contribute toward natural and social systems impacted by climate change. That plan was presented to the seminary’s Sustainability Commission in April and will go before the President’s Council during this calendar year.1
Another part of the “complicity” portion of the grant allowed us to cover the costs to bring in an environmental historian who could tell us the environmental history of our campus area. Working with our library archivists, this historian helped us understand not only the changing flora and fauna of the area over the past centuries but also to see how those changes overlap with the history of the post-Civil War American South, including, for example, the impact of redlining during the Jim Crow era. As CTS anticipates celebrating its bicentennial later this decade — and its centennial at its current location — this environmental history has helped us fill in holes about our institutional history.
One of the requirements of the AAAS grant was that at least a portion of it would go toward work that reached into the local community; hence, the “community” portion of the grant. Toward that end, CTS worked with partners at Agnes Scott College, Georgia Interfaith Power and Light, and the City of Decatur to host a public panel on how the city’s climate resilience planning task force is taking the concerns of climate justice into account, as it builds out plans for addressing potential climate-related crises that may arise in the near future, for example, severe heat events and storms that knock out power for multiple days. That panel, moderated by a noted journalist of Atlanta’s public radio station, not only helped Decatur’s citizens better understand the work that is underway and their roles in it; it also helped deepen CTS’s connections in the city and community.
Having worked our way through the curriculum, complicity, and community portions of the grant, what remains is the “communications” portion, of which this article is a small piece. As CTS looks toward its next hundred years, it is aware not only of infrastructure work that needs to be done, but educational and ecclesial work that requires its attention, such as shaping degree and non-degree programs that address the needs of the 21st century church. The seminary is also aware of the role it plays in helping to shape theological education as well as the vocations of our graduates and their ministries. We hope that our “Seeking Tikkun Olam” programs can bring attention to the intersections of science, climate, and justice, such that our renovations are environmentally friendly and our educational programs continue to integrate such intersections and model them for the wider church and society.
Having described in some detail the nature of our current projects of integrating (climate) science and (climate) justice into the work of Columbia Theological Seminary, I close with a set of reflections and recommendations for the readers of SciTech†. First, our experiences at CTS suggest that during the earth’s entrance into the Anthropocene, we should not separate the natural sciences from the humanities. Decisions we make, informed by the natural sciences, have real-world implications for the possibilities of and constraints on creaturely flourishing. As such, these decisions gain both acuity and legitimacy when the wisdom of the humanities is brought to bear on them. Technological fixes to climate change through geoengineering, for instance, need to be assessed not only on the basis of their technical viability but also in light of questions about the likelihood and severity of unanticipated consequences and the disproportionate costs that some communities — especially already vulnerable ones — might bear in the pursuit of such corrections. So, perhaps, generative artificial intelligence (GAI) may help us sort through massive amounts of data in the pursuit of viable responses to climate change. However, where GAI relies on massive amounts of energy and water, thinking about the locations of AI data centers ought to include attention to the historic and ongoing vulnerabilities of communities where such centers are potentially housed.
Similarly, how we think and behave as we live out our moral and theological commitments becomes not only more coherent but more impactful as we bring the wisdom of the natural sciences to bear on such commitments. Climate change does not affect all places in the same way or to the same degree, but the way it influences particular places, and the depth of its impacts, reverberate into other places. Since human and non-human thriving in one place is often dependent on actions in other locations, the pursuit of creaturely flourishing mandates attention to the complex ways climate change impacts many places and entities as well as it shapes interactions between them.
Especially during a time when, on the one hand, STEM majors at undergraduate institutions are being promoted and majors in the humanities are being diminished, and, on the other hand, scientific literacy and reading comprehension scores are declining within the wider population, the linking of the natural sciences to the liberal arts is ever more pressing.
Second, the actions that framed our “Seeking Tikkun Olam” grant relied neither on an enormous expenditure of resources nor the centering of just a few experts. While we hired a consultant to run our greenhouse gas inventory, many houses of worship could find consultants working to “green” faith communities. Georgia Interfaith Power and Light, for instance, has been working for decades, gratis, to help faith communities from various religions make their properties and practices more environmentally sustainable, and Interfaith Power and Light programs exist in most states. In addition, we did not expect our faculty to become experts on climate change in order to integrate the findings of climate science into their courses; modest honoraria were more than enough to bring scientists into our classrooms. Moreover, we are far less likely to have scientists on our faculty than churches are to have scientists in their congregations. All of which is to say that what we did at CTS is, we think, reproducible at scale for both much smaller and much larger communities and institutions.
Finally, don’t let the ongoing present urgencies prevent you from pursuing vital projects of the future. Much like churches, CTS can get caught up in its immediate concerns without giving attention to its wider context or its place in an environmentally vulnerable future. The grant was a catalyst for us to make sure we looked up and out and reduced our costs to do so. If CTS does its work well, the discoveries that have come with our grant will redound — including in energy and cost saving actions — well into the future. Many churches I know and work with have undertaken projects such as “Writing a new mission statement” or “Imagining our next decade together.” Perhaps yours has as well. If you do so, keep in mind that the rewards of paying attention to your faith community’s setting in, and interaction with, the natural world far outweigh the costs of paying attention to yet another thing. Giving attention to the natural world may help make better sense of your social and ecclesial location as well; indeed, it may be a precondition for doing it in a way that is faithful, honest, and functional.
- A centerpiece of the recommended climate action plan is the creation of a revolving green fund. This fund could start with a small amount of money—a couple thousand dollars—and put that money toward projects that increase energy efficiencies, the savings from which would go back into the green fund to be used to fund further efficiencies. And since most such efficiencies are ongoing, the fund has the potential to grow over time in order to fund larger projects at no new cost. Some sister institutions have pursued this path and, over the past decade, have cut their greenhouse gas emissions in half. ↩︎
