Stories

Two SCU Religious Studies faculty members offered a panel at the 2017 Catholic Theological Society of America (CTSA) meeting, commemorating the remarkable contribution of Rosemary Radford Ruether to scholarship at the nexus of theology, environment, women, social justice, and solidarity. Building on the panel’s success, they are continuing the project toward publishing a book.  Senior scholar and CTSA panel convener Teresia Hinga (SCU) and CTSA panelists Lilian Dube (University of San Francisco), Sarah Robinson-Bertoni (SCU), and Theresa Yugar (Loyola Marymount University) have joined to create an editorial team for the new publication.  Honoring Ruether, who employed scholarship toward social-environmental solidarity, the book will feature major liberation theologians Ivone Gebara (Brazil) and Aruna Gnanadason (India), who contributed to Ruether’s 1996 volume Women Healing Earth.  

The proposed title of the new volume is Valuing Lives, Healing Earth, which will highlight the religious, philosophical, and community-building work of people who, by virtue of socio-economic and social location, have particularly relevant ecological knowledge.  As global communities face local instability due to climate change, weather oscillations, biodiversity loss, deforestation, agricultural changes, freshwater shortage, ocean acidification, toxic pollution, and other environmental losses, this volume provides a means of cross-cultural, interreligious collaboration and mutual benefit, enhancing theological response-ability to the changing material-environmental lives of communities globally.