This volume explores how religious and spiritual actors engage for environmental protection and fight against climate change. Climate change and sustainability are increasingly prominent topics among ...religious and spiritual groups. Different faith traditions have developed ""green"" theologies, launched environmental protection projects and issued public statements on climate change. Against this background, academic scholarship has raised optimistic claims about the strong potentials of religions to address environmental challenges. Taking a critical stance with regard to these claims, the chapters in this volume show that religious environmentalism is an embattled terrain. Tensions are an inherent part of religious environmentalism. These do not necessarily manifest themselves in open clashes between different parties but in different actions, views, theologies, ambivalences, misunderstandings, and sometimes mistrust. Keeping below the surface, these tensions can create effective barriers for religious environmentalism. The chapters examine how tensions are manifested and dealt with through a range of empirical case studies in various world regions. Covering different religious and spiritual traditions, they reflect on intradenominational, interdenominational, interreligious, and religious-societal tensions. Thereby, this volume sheds new light on the problems that religions face when they seek to take an active role in today’s societal challenges. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
This volume explores how religious and spiritual actors engage for environmental protection and fight against climate change. Climate change and sustainability are increasingly prominent topics among ...religious and spiritual groups. Different faith traditions have developed "green" theologies, launched environmental protection projects and issued public statements on climate change. Against this background, academic scholarship has raised optimistic claims about the strong potentials of religions to address environmental challenges. Taking a critical stance with regard to these claims, the chapters in this volume show that religious environmentalism is an embattled terrain. Tensions are an inherent part of religious environmentalism. These do not necessarily manifest themselves in open clashes between different parties but in different actions, views, theologies, ambivalences, misunderstandings, and sometimes mistrust. Keeping below the surface, these tensions can create effective barriers for religious environmentalism. The chapters examine how tensions are manifested and dealt with through a range of empirical case studies in various world regions. Covering different religious and spiritual traditions, they reflect on intradenominational, interdenominational, interreligious, and religious-societal tensions. Thereby, this volume sheds new light on the problems that religions face when they seek to take an active role in today’s societal challenges. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
Climate compatibility is a cornerstone in the ecological transformation of modern society. In order to achieve sustainable development in all areas of society, numerous social actors must ...participate. This article examines the potential for the Catholic Church in German-speaking countries to contribute to such change. To this end, in contrast to most current studies, the Church is conceptualized as a multi-level actor instead of focusing only on the top of the hierarchy. Case studies are used to explore how various Church actors in different fields of social action evoke ecological awareness among members and non-members alike or participate in changing social structures.
In response to COVID-19, most governments implemented either general or geographically targeted lockdowns. While the contractionary effects of general lockdowns have been well-documented, this paper ...is the first to contrast the economic impacts of the two approaches in a quasi-experimental setting. To this aim, we construct a high-frequency database combining unique information from mobile devices and administrative data across Italian municipalities. Using difference-in-differences approaches, our results confirm that general lockdowns considerably reduced mobility and employment, but we also find that localised measures only led to modest declines in mobility with minimal additional impact on employment. Focusing on the distributional consequences, we show that economic activity decreased less in wealthier communities with a higher capacity for telework. Moreover, short-time work schemes, serving as automatic stabilizers, predominantly benefited affluent areas. We conclude that an optimal policy mix involves targeted lockdown measures, complemented by adequate social policies and infrastructure investment.
•General lockdowns during COVID reduced mobility, but strongly decreased employment.•Targeted lockdown policies, instead, led to a lower reduction in mobility and little economic cost.•Short-term work and teleworking buffered adverse consequences on the labor market.•Automatic stabilizers mostly supported high-income areas and white collar workers.•Both policies, lockdowns and automatic stabilizers, increased inequality during COVID.
Scholarship has suggested a “greening” of religions, supposing that faith communities increasingly become environmentally friendly and use their potentials to address environmental challenges. This ...contribution points to the problems of the supposed “greening” by indicating the ongoing disagreements in many religious traditions over environmental engagement. The disagreements show that religious environmentalism is an embattled terrain that involves actors with different interests, backgrounds, and understandings of their traditions. The authors illustrate that tensions are an inherent part of religious environmentalism, becoming manifest in different views and theologies, ambivalences, misunderstandings, and sometimes mistrust. They distinguish between four types of tensions: (1) intradenominational tensions, (2) interdenominational tensions, (3) interreligious tensions, and (4) religious-societal tensions. By drawing attention to the tensions of religious environmentalism, this contribution sheds light on the struggles and limitations that religious environmentalists face in their ambitions to address climate change and other environmental challenges.
This chapter examines the difference between theoretical claims and practical action in Christian environmental commitment in four benchmark cities in Switzerland and Germany. On the one hand, the ...development of Christian environmental ethics in the German-speaking and European Catholic and Protestant areas is traced. On the other hand, the interviews show that these reflections find their way to the grassroots only to a very limited extent. For although the environment and co-environment have been theologically explored by experts for several decades, these reflections are only very rarely found in conversation with the actors on site. Even if environmental protection does happen on the ground - especially in its form as "materialization" - it is usually justified by society's expectations of one of its actors. Furthermore, it becomes clear that environmental engagement in the community is by no means shaped by decisions and actions of the umbrella organization, but in the cases studied is based almost exclusively on the decision of individual actors.
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