Religion in Times of Earth Crisis: A Procession of Catastrophes

Registration Required: 

This is the first event is a six-part series that will take place live on Zoom and is free and open to the public. Attendees must register for each event separately. For those wishing to engage in discussion of the presentations with other audience members, Diane L. Moore will convene a live discussion on Zoom for one hour following each presentation. 

Environmental catastrophes can create a break in the experience of time, they can rupture the possibility of collective meaning. Yet for communities shaped by colonialism and racism, this rupture can only be understood in relation to the past, as an event in the “unceremoniously archived procession of our catastrophes,” to use Édouard Glissant’s words. Histories of colonial and racial devastation teach us that environmental futures are linked to our pasts. We may describe them as “ancestral catastrophes,” as Elizabeth Povinelly suggests. In this session, Mayra Rivera explores the question, “How may we engage those stories in ways that honor our pasts and open possibilities for different futures?”

Speaker: Mayra Rivera, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Religion and Latinx Studies
Moderator: Diane L. Moore, Diane L. Moore, Associate Dean of Religion and Public Life

Mayra Rivera works at the intersections between philosophy of religion, literature, and theories of coloniality, race and gender—with particular attention to Caribbean postcolonial thought. Her research explores the relationship between discursive and material dimensions of existence in shaping human embodiment and socio-material ecologies. She is the author of The Touch of Transcendence (2007) and Poetics of the Flesh (2015). Rivera is currently working on a project that explores the relationships between coloniality and ecological thought through Caribbean thought.

For more information on the full series, "Religion in Times of Earth Crisis: A Series of Public Online Conversations," visit hds.harvard.edu….