From Fracture to Flourishing: Jewish Law, Theology, and Environmental Ethics

We kindly invite you to the following online lecture of the Institute of Jewish Studies (University of Antwerp) in cooperation with UCSIA

Tuesday 1 March 2022 at 19:00 CET

From Fracture to Flourishing: Jewish Law, Theology, and Environmental Ethics
Prof. Ariel E. Mayse – Stanford University
With a response by Prof. Annemarie Mayer - Trier University  

Online lecture in English.

Global climate change is the greatest moral and existential crisis of our day. This lecture will explore how to draw upon the full range of Jewish theological, legal, and philosophical literatures to construct an environmental ethic, one that counters the values of market individualism and extractivism with alternative narratives and theories of obligation toward the non-human world. Rabbinic tort law can help us conceive of thorny problems like distributive justice, collective action, cumulative pollution, distributive justice and “slow violence”; Jewish creation narratives offer a vision of an integrated world, connected by sacred time and space beyond human  instrumentalization; Jewish mystical tradition enables the cultivation of resilience and hope through contemplative interiority. “The ecological crisis,” writes Mary Evelyn Tucker, “is also a crisis of culture and of the human spirit. It is a moment of reconceptualizing the role of the human in nature.” This lecture seeks to contribute to such renewal through constructively reading the sources of Jewish law and theology.