Polar Bears, People, and Possibility: Preaching Rapid Adaptive Evolution in the Climate Crisis

A polar bear stands on ice the size of a kitchen table. Her cubs trail behind, ribs showing. The platform her species hunted from for 40,000 years is vanishing. She is not failing. She is mismatched. This paper argues that congregations facing the climate crisis are standing on the same vanishing ice, experiencing evolutionary mismatch, the gap between the neural hardware humanity evolved for and the radically altered ecological world we now inhabit. Drawing on neurotheology, the more-than-human world, and creation-centered Open and Relational Theology, this paper proposes that preaching must evolve from transferring cognitive doctrine to facilitating neurobiological adaptation. Neurobiology shapes rhetoric entirely. And consciously participating in our own rapid adaptive evolution is not a supplement to spiritual practice. It is spiritual practice itself. This session will be facilitated as a spiraled, interactive, non-linear experience, inviting participants into embodied shared discovery in real time