On Wednesday April 19 from 7:30-9:00pm ET, Join Professor of Theology and World Religions at Union Theological Seminary the Rev. Dr. John Thatamanil and Christiana Zenner for an in-person conversation entitled “Swipe Left? The Anthropocene in Anti-Colonial Feminist Perspective”.

From the New York Times to the Economist and the Journal of Quaternary Stratigraphy, the “Anthropocene” has been proposed as the current geological epoch, in which humans are named as a decisive planetary force. Geology, this lecture argues, has quite a bit to do with theology. Unfortunately, in most iterations the deployment of the “Anthropocene” idea and its proxy of “climate crisis” does little to name the racialized, political economic, and theological imaginaries and colonial histories that have generated the massive eco-social degradations that are said to characterize this epoch. This talk both deconstructs the conceits of scientific modernity (geology, in particular) and its colonial knowledge-making apparatus, while pointing an anti-colonial, anti-racist way forward.

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Christiana Zenner, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Theology, Science, and Ethics and affiliated faculty in Environmental Studies at Fordham University-Lincoln Center. An anti-colonial feminist and scholar of modernity’s conceits in ecological science and religious ethics, Dr. Zenner is the author of the book, Just Water: Theology, Ethics, and Global Fresh Water Crises (2014, rev. ed. 2018). She is an expert on the Catholic Church’s turn to ecological justice; co-editor of two scholarly books on bioethics and sustainability; and the author of more than a dozen peer-reviewed articles on fresh water values, climate justice, and religious ethics. A prominent interpreter of Laudato Si’ (2015) for scholarly and public audiences, she has been published or quoted in the Washington Post, the New York Times, The New Republic, and more.