Theology in the Anthropocene – Dr Hjördis Becker-Lindenthal & Dr Simone Kotva

Welcome to Religion and Global Challenges, the podcast of the Cambridge Interfaith program brought to you by myself, Malinne Scheffes. In this episode, we continue our exploration of how climate change and ecology relate in myriad ways to religion and spirituality. To do so, I am joined today by two guests. First, we have Dr. Hjordi Specker Lindenthal, who is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, an affiliated lecturer at the Faculty of Divinity at the University of Cambridge, and who has done extensive research on the philosophy of religion, in particular CERN Kierkegaard and medieval mysticism. In order to save the planet and survive as a species, the world, as we know it, actually needs to end. And my second guest is Dr. Simone Kottwa, research fellow at the Faculty of Theology at the University of Oslo, an affiliated lecturer at Cambridge's Faculty of Divinity. Her research focuses on the intersection of philosophy, theology and earth ethics. Because apocalyptic texts are not just about the world ending and kind of mongering fear, but about really paying attention to the present that we have and showing the kind of consequences of our desires. Let me begin then by noticing that we really live in a world where the prospect of mass extinction has become very real, in the sense that every day we encounter news about yet another species that has gone extinct, and we hear about rising sea levels, expanding deserts and proliferating droughts. So it easily appears like the end of the world is near, in many ways. To what extent would you say that these kinds of ideas about the end of the world are shaped by Christian imaginaries about the apocalypse or the day of judgment? I think this is a very good question. In fact, the idea of an end of the world is as old as humankind. We find tales about it in all cultures, for instance, in the Hindu Bhagavad Gita on the old Norse story of Ragnarok in the Edda. And interestingly, these narratives, including the Christian one, are not about the end of the world, but about the end of the world, that is, the end of an era. The all-destroying natural disasters, mutually accompanied by a battle of gods, semi-gods, mythological creatures, or angels and demons, often are the necessary preparation of a new better world that is about to come. In the Abrahamic religions, the end of the world is also frequently associated with the judgment day, in which everyone is held accountable for the way they lead their lives. And maybe this is one of the attractions of understanding the current climate crisis in Biblical terms, because we know that we have wronged in our relation to the planet. And most of us continue to live unsustainable lives. In addition, these traditional narratives and images help us to know to make sense of an otherwise totally overwhelming, unprecedented situation, so no wonder that they keep reoccurring in popular culture. Think, for instance, of Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's novel Good Omens and its recent screen adaptation. One of the four horsemen, or rather, bikers of the apocalypse next to war, famine and death is called pollution. But resorting to traditional narratives, of course, also offers some comfort, some assurance in catastrophic time. It is the familiar, in the unfamiliar one could maybe even say. And sometimes there even is a kind of morbid fascination with our punishment and with the end of the world involved. However, what is easily forgotten is that there is a new world supposed to come after the apocalypse in most of this narrative. So also the threat of the looming end of the world that we are currently experiencing for the death of various species, including the possible extinction of the human race. So this might be turned into a chance or could be turned into a chance of the new world. In order to save the planet and survive as a species, the world as we know it, that is our ways of overconsumptive, exploitative living actually needs to end. Simone, would you agree with this, that the end of the world is necessary? This is a really good opening question, cut straight to the chase of the discussion really. And I'm reminded of one of the most controversial concepts associated with this idea of resorting to traditional narratives in relation to the end of the world and also kind of theology's relationship to these narratives, and that's apocalypse, apocalypticism. There was a really influential article written in the early, around the early 2000s, if it wasn't 2000, by a literary critic called Greg Gerard, and it's on apocalypticism and the biblical tradition in relation to environmentalism. And this has become a really influential narrative because it takes quite a negative stance towards this tradition, arguing that there are two different modes in which the biblical tradition presents apocalypse, comic and tragic. So the comic one is where we imagine a positive new world coming out of the ashes and ruins of the present world, and the tragic mode was sort of everything just kind of disappears and as an annihilated. And he argues that both of these modes are really prevalent in shaping environmental discourse, and that both are basically counterproductive, and that they distract attention from the present. This is his big argument. So apocalypticism and biblical narratives of the end of the world for Gerard are ways in which to not do environmentalism well. So this is really fascinating, I think, as a criticism, not least because it seems to equate biblical apocalyptic narratives with the end of the world, which, as Yerdis was saying, isn't quite the case when you look closer at these narratives and what they're about. The theme of an ending of the world is there, but it's not really the motivation of these texts. These texts are motivated by the desire to be attentive to the world as it is and to understand what's at stake with the present. There's been a really interesting recent book written on this by Catherine Keller called "Facing Apocalypse, Climate, Democracy and Other Last Chances," which came out just 2020, I think, 2021 even last year. And Keller makes a really good argument for saying that the critique of apocalypticism as bad theology-shaping environmentalism is perhaps somewhat wrong-fitted in relation to the tradition because apocalyptic texts are not just about the world ending and kind of mongering fear in relation to that, but about really paying attention to the present that we have and showing the kind of consequences of our desires and how they act out. And I think one thing that is not often attended to is the role paid by attention itself in these narratives of the end of the world. So one of my favorite texts to think about in relation to these narratives is the Apocalypse of Enoch, which is a text that is pseudo-epigraphical. So it's not in the Bible, but it's in the biblical tradition. And it's a really long narrative where Enoch lives in the biblical narrative before the flood. He's shown how the flood is going to happen and then what's going to happen later in the thousand year reign of the Messiah. What's really interesting here is that most of the book is not taken up with the obsessive account of the end of the world. It's taken up with this voyage that undertakes through earth, where he gets to see how everything is made, how dewdrops are formed, it's kind of a natural history of the world. And so these narratives of endings and cataclysmic convulsions, they're almost peripheral, they're almost like stage props, they're there to kind of pull you in, but the real interest is in the present. And you actually get something similar in the most famous Apocalyptic text, which is the book of Revelation, where you have the scenes that everybody remembers of like fire and brimstone. But you have a lot of other descriptions in that text woven into them, sort of subtle ones, which are all about just like, look at the world we have and look at the state of it. And so I think that the apocalyptic traditions that you have, not just of course in Christianity and Judaism and Islam, but in all sorts of religious and spiritual traditions are very much about using storytelling to attune ourselves to the present. And I think that's something which is often forgotten. So yeah, it does shape environmentalism, and it has shaped it negatively through millenarianism, through a kind of over emphasis on that the world is going to end. But it's also shaped it in many ways, which are indispensable to environmentalism, i.e. in the attentiveness that we show to the present by kind of retelling stories about its possible ending. And also, of course, in what you are just talking about in using the story of the ending of a world to think more constructively about how we want to live in the present. That's super fascinating. I was not aware of the attention towards the present that's actually really put forward by these kind of apocalyptic narratives. And this links to my next question, which is precisely about this question of attention within environmentalism and environmentalist movements that you already brought up. In a lot of environmentalist discourse, we see that there's this call for precisely what you were just saying, a different kind of attention towards the environment, a more perhaps spiritual form of engaging with the environment. And so, Simone, could you maybe elaborate a little bit on what you think is actually intended here when people talk about environmentalists talk about a shift in attention towards non-human species, toward that which surrounds us? And what might be the consequences of developing different forms of attention? Yeah, I can think of a number of different things. So first of all, there is this sense that what we need to shift in order to live sustainably and regeneratively across species and across cultures and religions is more attentiveness to what is not within my kind of personal sphere, right? And this is a theme that comes up a lot and it's presented as the hard problem as it were. The idea is that there are spiritual roots to the ecological crisis, which is kind of a different take on the Lin-White thesis, which is an interesting and very influential criticism of Christian theology, which argues that Christian theology is at the roots of the destruction of the environment, right? So this was a thesis that was put forward in the 1960s. So what we're seeing today is a shift in a somewhat opposite direction, which is this sense that a lack in awareness of the thinking, the beliefs and values that shape our habits of consumption, like how that works, what is the mechanics of it? And so people are turning to ancient, pre-modern, non-Western traditions of spirituality that have focused on precisely kind of reforming our habits of consumption and our mode of relating to our environment, to other people, to other creatures, to other ideas, and so on. So that's kind of why there is this emphasis on needing to be more attentive. And you see it both in religious writers who talk about it a lot, but you also see it in non-theological writers, writers who are not at all particularly interested or even positively inclined towards religion. So I think here's a really important meeting point and convergence between apparently disparate disciplines, but also groups, cultures, and also age groups. So this is often referred to as spirituality, spiritual exercise, and spiritual practice. And I think what it comes down to are these practices of attentiveness. And what's often discussed kind of technically, if you like, when it comes to attention, is a distinction between paying attention and being attentive. And this is something that is really important in a lot of spiritual traditions. So on the one hand, you have an attitude which is all about focusing on something in order to understand how it works, which is what we associate with, I guess, modern science in the West. And that's a bit different from what environmentalists are talking about when they say attentiveness, and especially when ecotheologians talk about attentiveness, thinking about more of a state of being, a sort of attitude, a composure. Attention isn't in this context, isn't something you do, but something that you are. You are attentive, rather than doing the act of paying attention. And that's the distinction which environmental thinkers are trying to get across a lot. There was a really good book recently translated into English called The Ecology of Attention by a Frenchman whose surname I'm probably mispronouncing, Citton, recently translated by Politi Press, which talks about this a lot, that attention itself is a kind of ecology. And so what's interesting about all of this, just to sum up, is that it's much less about telling you what to do and more about telling you, suggesting how to act. So it's, if environmental ethics during the 80s and 90s say, it's very focused on sort of giving guidelines on what to do, how to recycle well and kind of take care of your soil and your compost and so on. These are really valuable things. There's now more emphasis on those spiritual, if you like, practices that enable and make possible the desire to do those things that were focused on in the 80s and 90s in the literature, which I think is a really important shift. It doesn't mean that where we are now is a kind of better discourse at all, but it shows that perhaps we were kind of over-eager and ambitious with the discourse in the 80s and 90s. And so now we're trying to take a step back to look at what are the prerequisites for wanting to do those environmental things well. What does it take in kind of ethical terms to become a kind of person who would recycle, who would compost, who would learn about their localities and get engaged in like local sewerage, for instance? Obviously, when we talk about climate change, we often look at the big societal consequences of increasing numbers of devastating floods, hurricanes, droughts, all these scientific predictions of imminent climate change are often discussed on a very broad demographic societal level. But there are, of course, also personal and psychological consequences. So more and more people talk about the eco-anxiety and the climate despair that we can see especially amongst young people, for instance. But we've also all probably heard about the appeal of climate change denialism. There's then also the turn to very intensive activism, which might be seen also as another psychological, personal or subjective consequence in response to the kind of climate change scenarios that we are confronted with. So here it is if I may turn to you and ask, in this context of fear and despair that is connected to these contemporary and of world scenarios, what can we learn from Christian traditions or religious traditions, perhaps more broadly? Oh, this is a very important point, climate despair, Marlene. Thank you so much for bringing this up. So when it comes to despair, a very helpful conversation partner is the Danish 19th century philosopher and theologian Tern Kierkegaard. So in his book, The Sickness unto Death from 1849, he defines the human soul as involving a relationship of opposites, among them necessity and possibility. And he very convincingly argues that we fall into an all-consuming existential despair if we are not able to find a balance between necessity and possibility, that is a balance between the deterministic or fatalistic worldview and the life of daydreaming that only plays with the myriad of possibilities without actualizing any of them. The latter, the despair of possibility, can arise of the many resolutions we make to reduce our carbon footprint, so like never to fly anymore, boycott fast fashion brands, become vegan, get rid of the cargo, 100% plastic free and so on. But we do not follow through with these imagined very good possibilities or very helpful possibilities to actually save the planet and then just remain fantasies turning us into despairing climate action procrastinators. And then if we continue to look at Kierkegaard's Analyst of Despair, there is the opposite, which is the despair of necessity, which is the perceived lack of possibility in one's life. And this form of despair probably represents what is most commonly associated with climate despair, that is the paralyzing belief that whatever we do, either as collective or as individuals, it will not have a mitigating effect on global warming. But we, of course, know, and as you have mentioned, Malinne, there are also people who are unable or unwilling to accept that any drastic changes might happen. And Kierkegaard calls these persons the Spitzwoggers or the bourgeois who live within a certain trivial compendium of expectations as how do things go, as how to, yeah, what usually happens, and I think this is a pretty good description of what is actually going on in climate change denialism. So now you're probably burning to know what Kierkegaard's recommendation is to actually cure despair. For Kierkegaard, the cure is simply humble faith. So it is the belief that we are meant to continuously strive to actualize some possibility. So this is our sort of God-given path to keep the balance. And thus improving the world, but at the same time, never forgetting to know our place in the hierarchy of being. We cannot control possibility with something that Kierkegaard stresses again and again. And we cannot fully anticipate, and we should also not fully anticipate every outcome because it is God for whom everything is possible at any moment and we cannot get into the mind of God. Now I guess this could sound to somebody as being somewhat fatalistic, you know, sort of saying we just have to have faith. But does Kierkegaard also encourage us to develop some sort of more active hope in these current times? Oh, yes, absolutely. So for Kierkegaard, hope precisely arises out of a restored sense of possibility. So he distinguishes authentic or true hope from what he calls the merrily human manner of speaking about hope, which is kind of a longing, expectation, first of all, this thing and then for another thing. So this is the kind of hope for what we think is best for us. So and by contrast, true hope relates to the fullness of the divine, of the divine potential one could maybe say there is a kind of a distinction made by Jörg Maltman between Futurum and Future or in German Zukunft. And this is a distinction between Futurum and Zukunft, I think is helpful here to shed light on Kierkegaard's difference between true hope and its mere shadow, whereas Futurum is extrapolated from our experiences of the past and the present. Future associated with the radically new, with Parosia, with the second coming of Christ or with Adventus, what Maltman Almaser says. And in a similar vein, Kierkegaard defines true hope as relating oneself in expectancy to the possibility of the good. One could also maybe refer to the philosopher Sylvia Wojc, who summed it up very nicely when she said that such kind of radically hope that is not sort of focusing on particular and wishes and ideas of what might be needed for oneself in a particular time. Such radical hope is a gift of the Holy Spirit that recognized the limits of one's imaginative capacity quite a finite creature. And in a way, it has a kind of hoping against all hope, hope that transcends our cognitive and imaginative capacities, and also the horizon of collective memory. But if this kind of radical hopes is about, goes beyond that which we can imagine and that which we can understand, doesn't that then mean that once actions are irrelevant and that all one has to do is sort of blindly trust that this divine miracle will happen, that hope will become true, and in this case, then would stop global warming? Yeah, I can understand where you come from, but I don't think that as a logical hope necessarily renders human action irrelevant, or rather, to the contrary, I would say, because the experience of losing our all to human hopes can have a liberating effect like this we are relieved of the burden to bring about the future at large. And once we abstain from the desire to want to know for sure what the long term future will hold, we can then just focus on today, pretty much like, like Simone suggested, when it comes to being attentive, we just need to focus on the present and today, maybe also on tomorrow. So sadly, working towards or for particular futures without being crushed by the worries whether or not we will succeed to bring them about and to Kierkegaard's such attitude, humble courage. And I think this kind of humble courage is exactly what we need today as a virtue because what matters in humble courage is that one continuously tries to realize the good in small actions and habits day by day, again and again, without being paralyzed by the uncertainty of the future at large. So what we observe as Simone outlined these, you know, the environmentalist movement always are often calls for a more attentive relation towards the present and towards that which surround us. And at the same time, these kind of habits, as you just said, small actions and habits that we do day by day, they're often also focused, not just on being more attentive, but they're also focused on the fact that we need to somehow cut back on our consumption and lead a more austere lifestyle. So, you know, take the bike instead of driving with a car to work, or, you know, forgoing that planned holiday of a Christmas where you are planning to fly to a warm holiday destination in the midst of winter, or, you know, the call to no longer consume certain types of food because they are bad for the environment. And so I was wondering here, do you see in these calls a reverberation perhaps of Christian forms or other religious forms of asceticism? And if that is actually the case, what can we learn perhaps from these ascetic traditions? An excellent question. So commonly asceticism is understood as abstinence and renunciation of physical indulgence, in short, as something for which we automatically shy away because we think we are sacrificing something, that we are giving up something good. But the long tradition of Christian asceticism is grounded in a very complex and then in a hopeful theological anthropology, and it understands abstinence in this larger context as a way to die to our sinful self, that is, to a self that we are not meant to be. And this has been most prominently explored in the famous spiritual manual, The Letter of Divine Essence, which has been written, I think, 600 CE by John Climacus, who was a monk of the Egyptian desert, and such asceticism like Climacus' aims at the core of our very being and not just at a few habits. So the ascetic actually works on restoring the self that she is supposed to be, and that is an image of God. This implies that, in fact, the ascetic actually does herself a favor rather than giving up something good. She is receiving something good. She is receiving herself again, one could maybe say. Now how does this relate to the various lifestyle changes we need to make in relation to climate change, one might ask, through offering exercise in dying to the perception of the natural world as a warehouse of goods, which we use to satisfy the needs of overconsumption, traditional Christian asceticism, actually could inspire us to save the planet and also at the same time to become better versions of ourselves? Simone, I feel this might bring us back to the question of attention or this question of what's the spiritual heart of environmentalism, and what does it mean when we are called upon to sacrifice in the name of the environment, to save the environment? What are your thoughts on this? I guess I'm inclined to think that attention here has to work in at least a twofold way. So on the one hand, there is a call to be more attentive. Now this is something which we can see has spiritual roots, and if we're looking just at the West, you could say that, well, Christianity is the spiritual tradition par excellence, which has argued consistently throughout centuries that there is a spiritual life which consists in this kind of open receptivity towards not only God, but creatures, this idea that you learn about the creator from studying the book of nature, that hospitality to your fellow human beings as well as plants and animals is essentially like the Christic path, right? That's an argument that's made a lot, has been made a lot, and we have Pope Francis now who's arguing this and trying to embody a kind of second Saint Francis. On the other hand, though, if we take this call to spiritual attentiveness seriously, it also has to issue in a self-reflectivity on the tradition making the claim. So if we're thinking about the West again, which is where I am, where we are in this conversation, although Christianity has been the kind of matrix of spiritual traditions arguing for this kind of attentiveness, Christianity as an institution has also conspired directly and indirectly in colonialism and extractive ecologies, extractive cultures and really violent gestures and in preparing the conditions that made ecological disaster possible, right? So when I think about attention, I think of it both in terms of a spiritual exercise that has a kind of historical lineage that it's important to recover, but also it as a kind of critical exercise. So we can't naively kind of go back to, and this is something that Yerdus and I talk a lot about, it's not about naively going back to John Climacus saying, let's live like that. It's about seeing how the tradition of spiritual exercise has conspired with an anti-ecological kind of politics, right? And that brings me to the kind of real, I think the, what's at stake with attention is precisely this ability to be open to the ambiguities and to dither. I mean, I know that the Anthropocene has been nicknamed the kind of the age of the great dithering when we did nothing and so on, but there is a kind of a virtue to dithering in the sense that many of the catastrophic events that are happening at the moment are the result of making really big grand gestures and decisions, right? A kind of eye of the raw thinking and that a more careful and attentive way of approaching the situations that we have in the world is about not looking for absolute solutions and absolute claims and to be more present to the kind of pluralities of these situations. And so attentiveness is not solution oriented thinking, which may seem contradictory when it comes to something like environmentalism, where it's always about like, how can we save? How can we find the solution? The solution is not to be tempted by the idea that there is one solution and that is precisely what spiritual traditions usually emphasize, right? That being attentive and open means living in a present that you accept as the present. That idea of acceptance can often have quite a kind of apathetic ring to it as if you sort of just cultivate this dispassionate attitude. But it's really much more about being able to be with it and be attentive to it as it is for what it is. Timothy Morton, who's a very popular environmental philosopher, talks about this a lot. He talks about it as just the ability to kind of say hello to the world for what it is, not wanting it to be something more, not looking behind it for some true meaning or purpose. And spiritual traditions have always cultivated different technologies of the self as the sometimes called or techniques of ecstasy for making that possible. I also had something I wanted just to say and get back to this idea of despair. I might be a bit provocative here, but in the tradition of Christian spirituality, which is what we were talking about, asceticism, this idea of practicing in order to reform our habits. And the idea here is that you're supposed to get back to a kind of natural state, whatever that's supposed to mean. It's always very ambiguous. But the idea is to be more like the animals, the plants around you who effortlessly just live. They don't care about their clothing or tomorrow or something. I mean, they're not apocalypticists, the plants. This idea is articulated in ways that actually talk about despair being not at all emphasized enough in whatever contemporary society that the mystics are writing from. So what I mean is that John Climacus, for instance, talks about the need to mourn continually, like all the time, and that the problem is that most monks, they do a bit of mourning every day to kind of reflect on their sins and so on, and then they go about their day thinking, "Oh, I did a jolly good job that morning of confessing my sins and thinking that I'm a bad person," and then they should just go on that daily life. And Climacus says that you have to do this all the time. And the temptation is to think that you are done mourning, that you have kind of repented enough. And I think if we think in relation to contemporary environmental ethics and where we are in the discussion of the Anthropocene and the discourse that surrounds it, modern, the contemporary West has like a great fear of anxiety as if it's something bad. And so the idea is like, how do we kind of cure the symptom and so on. Because maybe one way of thinking about it differently would be maybe we're not mourning enough, like if we really took this seriously and we're really in grief about it, like would we be able to do anything, right, other than just mourn for it, really grieve, like true grieving is something we don't really do very much in the West anymore, you know, we don't really have multi-day mornings for just a death of a human being anymore, right. And so how are we supposed to really learn how to mourn for something as unimaginable as species extinction and a planetary kind of organic death, perhaps we're not mourning enough. And so I love when we work together, Yerdis and I on these ancient texts, it really kind of taking seriously some of the imperatives there and thinking like how kind of difficult they are to do today to conclude when secular critics talking about Christian theology and environmentalism argue that theology has a kind of damaging effect on environmentalism by emphasising and hyping anxiety and distress, I think that it doesn't hype it up enough because the spiritual tradition of Christianity tells you to mourn all the time, that this is not something that you can ever be rid of, right. And I think in relation to the issues we were talking about earlier about kind of recognising Christianity's complicity in colonialism, for instance, and extract of ecologies and cultures, this is absolutely crucial if we thought that, oh, there's a kind of mourning period for that, like let's say a year, we're going to have a year of thinking about the ills that Christianity has done in relation to the planet and its future, I mean, that's not a very good way of thinking about it, right, one year of mourning and then we're done. This is continual, right, so yeah, it's maybe we've not mourned enough. Here to see you want to come in at this point. If I just sort of could jump in again, this is why I find Kierkegaard so helpful here, because for him despair always comes before the process of becoming an authentic self. So Kierkegaard's work is absolutely not directed towards evading self or sort of evading despair or providing a cure for despair once and for all. And in that way, I mean, Kierkegaard doesn't say much about nature or of course not about climate change or climate despair, but I think he can be very helpful here in order to embrace all these strong emotions that we are currently facing and all the difficult mental states that we are currently experiencing in the wake of the climate crisis. So this is actually something that we can use in order to take action in a sustainable manner that does not drive us into a paralyzing despair, but rather as a kind of mobilizing effect on the agency of the self and also on the agency of our individual psyches in the way. So we can become sort of not only better ecological selves, but also we can learn to lead better existences in general as a person. So from what you were just saying, you know, a lot of these discussion always focus on how we have to work on ourselves, become better moral selves, become more attentive. And so it's always sort of a program of change for the individual. And I think in theory, a lot of people will probably agree with that, that we need to become better selves, but then change seems to be really difficult to come by in the sense that we just, you know, no matter how much we might agree in theory, we end up, you know, hurtling towards climate emergency with frightening speed. So why do you think that environmentalism and these ideas about moral change are failing to actually achieve sort of lasting changes in how we conduct our lives? And does this failure have to do with, you know, the kind of ideals that environmentalism pursues? Yeah, I'd say they have to do entirely with the ideals that environmentalism pursues and the operative metaphors that guide a lot of the discourse. So as we were talking about earlier, one of the main failures of environmentalism, I guess, is the idea that there is such a thing as a kind of separate environmental discourse, but also that there are solutions. A solution-oriented thinking is precisely what got us into this mess. What I mean is that big decision thinking, the idea that you make war or you have peace, you invade some place, you extract something, move it somewhere else. This is big decision thinking, right? It's not localised thinking, it's not attentive to particular places to communities and environments. This is thinking that is based on larger narratives, bigger aims and goals for which the particulars must be sacrificed. This is science as big technology, the pursuit of knowledge at all costs, including the costs of lives of individual human beings, of individual creatures, places, cultures and so on, right? Big decision thinking is what got us into this mess. When environmentalism uses that rhetoric, they are digging themselves into the mess. What it would mean to step back from that and slow thinking down, which is an expression that Isabel Stengis uses, the idea of slowing thinking down. It's going to be a lot messier, it's not going to be efficient anymore, it's really difficult to sell that, it doesn't sound very sexy. It's difficult to theorise it because it's to do with being attentive to particularities. There's no overarching grand theory of it because there's no big decision thinking, right? That's why it's difficult to articulate and that's why environmental discourse pulls away from it, even though most environmental philosophers, if you read their work carefully, are all trying to say that the answers are not in the big answer thinking, right, but in attention to place. But how do you make that sexy? How do you sell that, right? And every time it becomes commodified as like nature writing or beautiful kind of landscape art. Again, we have a commodity, you have something that you can sell, so it's really complicated because every time there is an articulation of it, the way it's presented becomes its own fortress, as it were, captures that. So yeah, I would say that is one of the main stumbling blocks we like. Thank you for joining us for this latest episode on the intersections between religion and spirituality with man-made climate change. If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to like our show and to subscribe to it on all the major podcast platforms. For more information about this and previous episodes, including recommended readings, feel free to check out our website at interfaith.cam.ac.uk/podcast. [BLANK_AUDIO]