Senior Research Seminar with Professor Joel Robbins (University of Cambridge)

Professor Joel Robbins (University of Cambridge)

Many people have come to the conclusion that simply sharing the scientific data on global warming with the public has not been enough to motivate the kind of consistent action that would be needed to successfully address the threat it presents.  In this lecture I consider whether religion might have some unique role to play in bringing such action about.  At the core of my argument are the claims that religions often transform everyday understandings of temporality and that notions of temporality in turn profoundly shape the way people approach realizing the values they hold, including those related to climate change.  In light of these claims, I suggest that religion can play a role in fostering climate action that many other institutions have not been able to play successfully.  Throughout the lecture, I draw on work in the anthropology of religion and time, one the one hand, and in the philosophy of values, on the other, to build my argument.

I am an anthropologist of religion, ethics, and cultural change whose research works to stimulate thinking about the role of values in anthropological theory. Regionally, my ethnographic fieldwork was among the Urapmin of Papua New Guinea. My current and future fieldwork focuses on religious education in a range of higher education settings. This project will focus on the intellectual aspects of religious life, particularly among religious elites. I have a longstanding interest in developing the anthropological study of Christianity and have an interest in continuing the comparative study of Christianity from anthropological perspectives and in furthering the dialogue between anthropology and theology.