CARe's Brown Bag Lunch Series features presentations by recent CARe/GTU grant recipients, students, faculty, and staff. Our March talk will be given by 2019 Spring CARe Grant recipient Matthew Hartman (PhD, GTU), who traveled to Cork, Ireland in June 2019 to give a paper at the Conference of the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture.
His paper, The Historical Relations of Our Ecological Crisis: Theology, Colonialism, and Capitalism’s Logics, draws on art, literature, and film to challenge the concept of the Anthropocene and its increasingly dominant cultural narrative in describing the current era of climate change. Bolstered by climactic spectacles in art and visual media, the Anthropocene assumes a universalized human subject separated from nature and rooted in European industrialization—a narrative that champions technical responses, ignoring religion and the complex worlding relations between humans and their environments. Matt will explore the alternative concept of Capitalocene, which highlights the intertwining nexus of theology, capitalism, and colonialism to engender new religious thinking and creative artistic renderings.
The Doug Adams Gallery is the primary exhibition space for the Center for the Arts & Religion at the Graduate Theological Union.