CSD brings climate and ecological scientists as guest lecturers to seminaries in North America. ICSD has a speakers bureau of over 100 climate and environmental scientists across the U.S., as well as in eleven cities in the U.S., which have high concentrations of seminaries. The cities are New York City, Boston, Portland, Los Angeles, San Francisco, St. Louis, Chicago, Austin, Davis/Sacramento, Philadelphia, and New Jersey. Many of these scientists were vetted by Climate Voices as people who are both experts on environmental science and articulate in speaking to groups about it. The scientists work at NASA or other governmental agencies, or are professors at universities.
ICSD is in contact with over 245 seminaries in the vicinity of these eleven cities to try to bring this project to them, in order to upgrade the capacity of emerging clergy to speak to ecological issues. So far, we received positive responses from sixteen seminaries who expressed interest in having a scientist speak at their seminary on environmental science and climate change. ICSD encouraged these seminaries to arrange for a local scientist which ICSD recommended to speak at their seminary.
If you are interested in ICSD assisting your seminary in having a scientist speak on ecological themes, please contact us.
In October, 2020, we facilitated soil scientist Dr. Dianna Bagnall, from the Soil Health Institute in North Carolina, giving a virtual teaching to a Hebrew Bible course of Rev. Dr. Kathryn Schifferdecker, Professor and Chair of Old Testament and Chair of the Bible Division at Luther Seminary in Minnesota. We’re doing this to enable emerging clergy to have a better sense of environmental sustainability.
Testimonial from Gregory Heille, O.P., Academic Dean, Aquinas Institute of Theology, St. Louis:
“The faculty spent two hours with Benjamin deFoy and his time with us was a big success. He is an entertaining teacher who knows how to draw folks in throughout a presentation. His powerpoint slides about climate change demonstrated several patterns over centuries and millennia to show that climate change cannot be explained as a cyclical pattern. Benjamin also demonstrated detailed knowledge of Pope Francis’s encyclical letter on the environment, Luadato Si. He thus juxtaposed the two worlds of science and faith/theology in a manner that felt quite relevant to our teaching—though we did not discuss teaching per se.
Benjamin’s department of climate and environmental science is located in O’Neil Hall of Saint Louis University, and O’Neil Hall was Aquinas Institute’s previous home for thirty years. It is a small world, and you introduced us to a wonderful colleague from our own back yard!”
