Following the Future/s theme, this session explores how preaching is shaped by ecological change, climate crisis, and the search for responsible and hopeful ways of speaking in uncertain times. The session aims to bring homiletics and ecological questions into a constructive conversation: practical, reflective, and attentive to lived experience.
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
Preaching in times of ecological crisis requires more than new sermon topics; it calls for a transformation of the homiletical imagination itself. This paper explores ecological preaching as an embodied and relational practice that begins with attentiveness to place and the more-than-human world. Drawing on the article “How Does Creation Speak? Interwoven Preaching Between Mindfulness and Resistance,” it proposes preaching as a movement shaped by mindfulness, resistance, and relational listening rather than primarily rhetorical proclamation. The presentation also introduces a pedagogical experiment developed in the intensive seminar “Earth as Text, Earth as Pulpit,” where students engage in practices such as walking meditation, ecological observation, and collaborative sermon experiments. These practices function as a laboratory for ecological homiletics in which attentiveness, authority, and proclamation are rethought together. The paper argues that ecological preaching emerges where theological speech is grounded in embodied listening, relational accountability, and the lived realities of particular places.
This paper develops the notion of eco-autobiography, as articulated by Melanie L. Harris in Ecowomanism, in conversation with Howard Thurman, a preacher-theologian shaped by interfaith encounters and deep ecological spirituality. By reading Thurman’s life through the lens of eco-autobiography, I demonstrate how Thurman’s ethic of nonviolence, inspired by Mohandas Gandhi, is intertwined with eco-spirituality. In this sense, nonviolence becomes not only an ethical commitment but also an ethical responsibility to nurture the web of interconnected relationships that sustain all living organisms. This interreligious eco-autobiographical approach highlights the multiplicity of voices—Christians, non-Christians, and non-humans—that shape our interconnected being, resisting dominant Christian metanarratives that silence non-Christian and non-human stories. Lastly, by introducing a spirituality of interconnectedness from Daoism as a third component, I propose an eco-homiletical theology of interconnectedness, emphasizing pluralistic, relational, and hybrid practices that recognize non-Christian and non-human companions as co-participants in theological reflection and the practice of preaching.
Current preaching often avoids the climate crisis or offers inadequate "creation care" rhetoric. This proposal offers a framework for homiletical growth through three critical practices: cultivating ecological relationality, developing futurist orientations in our preaching, and engaging in trauma-informed homiletical praxis. By dismantling the "resource" mindset in relation to the earth in favor of a web-of-life relationality, preachers can foster deeper kinship among congregations with the more-than-human world. By cultivating anticipatory views of potential futures, sermons can move beyond mere diagnosis toward cultivating communal courage and risk-taking toward those futures. Finally, by embracing and making generative space for eco-emotions — grief, anger, fear, and even despair — as elements of a practiced hope, faith communities can navigate catastrophe with a sense of resistance to the forces behind that catastrophe and the collective efficacy of communal engagement with the realities that the catastrophe is bringing into our lives and planetary community.