Category: Religion

On the ethical implications of the biomass of domain archaea

A friend of mine is a graduate student doing research in microorganisms in the domain archaea. Archaea are one of three domains of life, the other two being eukaryotes and bacteria; plants, animals, algae, protozoa, slime molds, and fungi are included in the domain eukaryotes.

In talking with my friend graduate student recently, he mentioned that some biologists believe that organisms of the domain archaea might well comprise a significant portion of the biomass of the planet; archaea and bacteria together probably comprise half the biomass of the planet. Many organisms in archaea live in extreme environments, like deep sea ecosystems. It is unclear to what extent archaea and bacteria will be affected by global climate change, but at the very least deep sea ecosystems may remain relatively unaffected for some time.

This raises an interesting ethical point. A popular ethical argument says we should stop global climate change because it will lead to massive species extinctions. But what is really meant is that global climate change will cause extinctions to a small percentage of organisms in the domain Eukaryotes, specifically larger plants and animals; that is, it may be that a small portion of the earth’s biomass will be affected.

Considered another way, while a huge number of species may be driven to extinction by global climate change within a relatively short time, that’s in comparison to past numbers of extinctions within a given time period. But if you compare the number of extinctions to the total number of species on Earth, then it’s a very small number.

So from an ethical point of view, what we find most troubling about global climate change is that it has the potential for killing off the species with which we are most familiar, and on which we are most dependent. We know so little about archaea, and cyanobacteria, and the hundreds of thousands of insect species that have yet to be described, that it’s hard for us to have much in the way of concrete ethical concern for them — we don’t even know if we should be concerned for them. My friend the graduate student put it something like this: We don’t really know what the effects of global climate change are going to be, but it seems likely that most of earth’s organisms won’t be affected by it.

This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be concerned about global climate change. We should be desperately concerned about global climate change. But any ethical concern should stem from our ethical concerns about how it is going to affect us human beings — whether global climate change will kill species we love, ruin ecosystems we depend on, and maybe even drive us to extinction. Our ethical concern should not stem from worries about archaea, or even about termites, both of which comprise a great deal of the earth’s biomass and both of which will probably survive global climate change quite nicely, thank you.

Gary Dorrien on the Occupiers

Christian Century magazine interviews social ethicist Gary Dorrien on the Occupy Wall Street movement. The interview is a promotional piece for an essay by Dorrien in the latest issue of Christian Century, but it’s worth reading on its own. Best bit from the interview:

As a social ethicist whose field was invented by the Social Gospel movement, I treasure the Social Gospel’s emphasis on just distribution and the common good, along with Reinhold Niebuhr’s realist emphasis on power politics and the faults of liberal idealism. But liberationist criticism adjudicates what I take from the Social Gospel and Niebuhrian traditions. Social justice must not be reduced to concerns about the fair distribution of things. It is also about giving voice to oppressed communities and being liberated from structures of oppression and dependency.

Read the interview.

REA conference, part seven

Some miscellaneous notes on, and information from, the Religious Education Association annual conference:

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The conference proceedings are online, an consist of working papers presented at the conference in Research Interest Groups and Colloquia:
www.religiouseducation.net/proceedings/2011amproceedings

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One of the pleasures of attending the conference was seeing luminaries in the field of religious education like Gabriel Moran and Thomas Groome; these are people who wrote books and articles that were formative in my own development as a religious educator. I also enjoyed hearing the REA archivist’s report, in which he talked about previous REA members who had also influenced me. It was also affecting to hear about the death of Harold Burgess when recently deceased REA members were recognized before Saturday night’s banquet; Burgess’s Models of Religious Education was a very important book for me in my first five years working as a Director of Religious Education. Continue reading “REA conference, part seven”

REA Conference, part six

“Diversity and Neuroscience” was the title of the fifth plenary session of the annual conference of the Religious Education Association (REA). Moderator Harold Horell introduced the panel discussion with two questions:

— What are the implications of neuroscience for the field of religious education? — and
— How did the presentations and conversations address the racially and ethnically diverse constituencies of the Religious Education Association?

Claire Smith of Saint Paul School of Theology was the first panelist to speak. “I found in this conference an awareness of the issues of diversity,” she said, “and a concern to include all.” She gave several specific examples, e.g., the recognition of native peoples in the opening ritual.

While there was a general awareness of diversity issues within the REA, Smith offered two cautions.

First, much of the brain research we have is provisional, and “we should not treat it as gospel.” In spite of this caution, Smith said that there is much that comes out of this research that are important for our work as religious educators. Continue reading “REA Conference, part six”

REA conference, part five

During the Saturday afternoon breakout session of the Religious Education Association annual conference, I attended a workshop titled “Practical Neuroscience for the Pews”; it was led by Mary Cheng and Alan Weissenbacher, both doctoral candidates at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley.

Of the six people who participated in this workshop, three were full-time practitioners working in local congregations: a catechist serving a Roman Catholic parish outside Toronto, a pastor serving a Uniting Church congregation near Brisbane, Australia, and me, a minister of religious education from California. Another participant was associated with Fordham, but she also served in a local congregation, and I believe at least one other participant also served a Catholic parish. The workshop leaders encouraged full participation from the rest of us and allowed the conversation to range widely; as a result, this report may seem a little disjointed. However, the workshop seemed anything but disjointed: at the end, several of us agreed that it was by far the best presentation yet.

Goals and ends

Weissenbacher and Cheng began by asking us to consider what our goals are as religious educators, and to consider how brain science gets us to our goals. Then Weissenbacher asked a provocative question: If we use brain science to reach our religious education goals, how are we different from those who use brain science to practice mind control? Does what we are doing lay the foundation for more intrusive mind control techniques? He said that key difference is that religious educators (ethical ones, anyway) respect the agency of the people they are educating; furthermore, religious educators will be quite open about the techniques they are using. Continue reading “REA conference, part five”

REA conference, part four

The fourth plenary session of the annual Religious Education Association conference was devoted to “lightning talks,” five-minute presentations by scholars on their work in progress. I’ll give brief overviews of three of the lightning talks that I found of particular interest; and I’ll add one more quick overview of current research at the end.

Mark Hayse of MidAmerica Nazarene University spoke about his current research in theology and technology, and in particular about his study of video games from a theological perspective. He said that there is a tension in video games between narrative or story, and procedures and rules. He also said that video games provide an interesting bridge between religious education and technological studies. In his research, he draws on the work of Dwayne Hubner and others regarding the synthesis of the spiritual and the aesthetic.

Hayse said his research has raised some challenging questions, including the following: Continue reading “REA conference, part four”

REA conference, part three

For the Saturday morning breakout sessions at the Religious Education Association annual conference, I went to Ryan Gardner’s presentation titled “Improving Teacher Reflection in the Religious Education Classroom.” Gardner is doing his Ph.D. research on how paid religious education teachers at the Latter Day Saints Seminaries and Institutes of Religion (S&I).

Gardner introduced his work on teacher reflection with a quote from Joseph Smith, who once wrote about “serious reflection and great uneasiness.” Gardner suggested that often serious reflection by religious education teachers can often lead to great uneasiness. Certainly, this has been my experience supervising volunteer teachers, and I found it very interesting to talk about how serious reflection may often lead to greater uneasiness for teachers, at least in the short term.

His doctoral dissertation aims to come up with a practical, useable model for teacher reflection. He has recently concluded a research phase, where he did intensive qualitative field research of six S&I teachers, trying to determine what kinds of reflection they engaged in as teachers. He led us through his theoretical approach, and wound up presenting us with an instrument for teacher reflection. Continue reading “REA conference, part three”

REA conference, part two

During the Friday afternoon breakout sessions of the annual Religious Education Association conference, I went to a colloquium that included three different presentations, on quite different subjects.

The first presentation was titled “Deepening Pedagogy to Adolescents,” and was presented by Carmichael Crutchfield of Memphis Theological Seminary, whose research area is African American adolescents.

Crutchfield began by quoting A Winter’s Tale where Shakespeare has a shepherd say that the most troublesome time in a person’s life is between the ages of 10 and 23:

I would there were no age between sixteen and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting… [Act III, scene iii]

This is just the time that neuroscientists now tell us that our brains are going through some major developments. He then read a passage which described how young people no longer treat their elders with respect — and then revealed that this very contemporary-sounding passage was actually written 2,500 years ago by Plato. So adolescence has long been a challenging time of life. “We are called, as practical theologians,” said Crutchfield, to “better understand adolescents.” Continue reading “REA conference, part two”

REA conference, part one

Near Toronto

David Hogue spoke on the topic “Practicing Religion, Forming the Faithful” in the first plenary session of the Religious Education Association (REA) Annual Meeting for 2011. Hogue is a professor at Garrick Evangelical in Evanston, Illinois, and has research interests in ritual, liturgy, pastoral care, and brain science. He is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church USA.

Hogue gave a brief orientation to the physiology of the brain from the point of view of a practical theologian. He also pointed out that neuroscience is investigating questions that religions have been pondering for a long time. He believes both science and religion can contribute productively to an ongoing investigation of these questions.

Hogue said he is convinced that experiences of spirituality are grounded in experiences of everyday living, and in particular he’s interested in storytelling, memory, and human relationships. These three areas are also topics of interest to neuroscience. Rather than discuss “spirituality” per se, he chose to focus on these three specific areas to engage religious education with neuroscience. Continue reading “REA conference, part one”

Toronto, I think

I’m in Toronto for the annual Religious Education Association annual meeting. This year’s topic is neuroscience and cognitive science as applied to religious education.

I say I’m in Toronto, except that the conference is in an airport hotel, which looks like every other airport hotel I’ve ever been in. The only way I know that I’m really in Toronto, and not in San Francisco, is that the airport had bilingual French and English signs.