Shambling toward an essay on 'Anthropocene' and religious studies - which seems barely to have noticed the discussion - I was delighted today to happen on the interdisciplinary "Anthropocene Curriculum" which has been assembled through the Haus der Kulturen der Welt since 2013. Germans know more about theology than Americans, if less about religious studies, so I was hopeful. But what their cool visual search (the array is different each time) offered on the term "Religion" was just this.
It looks like religion is a player but it's not. Most links are circumstantial and there's no line of "relation" with "Anthropocene" at all! Is religion so obviously off the map? Are the religions dismissed without further ado as creatures of the now destabilized holocene (causes of anthropogenic effects but no use in understanding or combatting them), scholarship on religion as the study of sterile where not toxic fantasy? Are they human-all-too-human at a time where we need to rethink everything about what it does and doesn't mean to be human? Give us a chance!
