What the humanities can offer a world in crisis

This is part of an ongoing series of blog posts following up on some of the real-world, community-based work initiated through Pando Days that’s continuing to make a difference. We sat down with Chris Doran, Professor of Religion and Sustainability at Pepperdine University, to discuss the work that is continuing to be done on his Pando Days ‘22 project, Climate Migration and Faith — focused on the responsibility of faith communities to use their resources to help those most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. After a year-long sabbatical spent writing a book on the topic, Chris returns to Pando Days 2024/’25 to collaborate with his students in furthering this work. 

Pando: Hello Chris! We loved your “Climate Migration and Faith” project for Pando Days from two years ago and are excited to see it continuing to move forward with so much momentum. Fill me in about what has happened over the last couple years and what is happening now.

Chris Doran: So, for some context, two years ago my students worked on a project to develop a communication strategy and lesson plans focused on how to talk to Protestants regarding the intersection of climate migration and faith. 

There is a church right here in Malibu that we used to conduct research and engage in this really complex conversation. 

Afterwards, I had a sabbatical year in which I finished a book on the topic of climate migration from the perspective of a Christian theologian, talking about it from the perspective of five different virtues.

Can you tell me a bit more about this book before we move on?

I wrote more than a 100,000 word manuscript on the topic, looking at the virtues of hospitality, justice, solidarity, courage, and more. It was actually just accepted for publication. So, some time, probably next summer or a bit later, it will be out for purchase. 

Wow, perfect fit with your Pando Days project. I can’t wait to read it. 

Now getting back to this year’s project itself, what do you have in mind?

This year, my group is again, doing a similar project on communication strategy with lesson plans with the same church in Malibu.

Is there a reason you are returning to the same church with the same goal?

Well, it is technically the same church but they have different leadership now. So, we will have a completely different landscape. It will be healthy to see how these sorts of changes in the past two years present new challenges in terms of getting the ideas across to new people.

How do you see this building off of the work you completed two years ago? 

The main advantage of doing this is that we are constructing a think-tank to consider this and similar issues from the Gen-Z perspective. And that sort of work only builds upon itself. 

Students are the ones doing the assignment, having these intergenerational dialogues, and putting in lots of hard work. 

It is really interesting because when my students open these dialogues up, they start to realize that it is much, much more complicated to talk to older people about climate issues, especially when you add migration on top of that, than they originally thought.

These sort of conversations are incredibly complicated and require years and years of effort.

I have been really impressed so far at the level of sensitivity and empathy the current student group has, taking into deep consideration the language they use before going into meetings with church leaders. They bounce ideas back and forth and listen attentively to feedback. 

You mentioned intergenerational conversations.  What is the congregation like that they are working with?

Two of the student groups are working with, for lack of a better term, the 35 and older population of which the majority are actually 55 and older. Then there is a group working with college-age members of the ministry and the last group with high-school students. So, it is interesting to hear the differences. 

High-schoolers, for instance, have no issue talking about climate change; for them, it is just a natural part of life as it is now. Also, due to the general environment of Malibu, many of the students frequently run into people who do not look a lot like them and are, in fact, climate migrants – early refugees from the challenges the class is dealing with. So, when my students go to talk to them about climate and migration as a linked topic, it may be the first time the students are making that connection.

It makes sense the younger generations are more open to discussing these issues. Climate change can definitely be a hot political issue, and immigration is increasingly becoming just as divisive. I am curious, as students talk with older generations, how are they navigating potential political rifts? 

I actually think this sort of work is encouraging to them. It is a highly political topic. But, with it, they are finally getting out and having real, difficult conversations which is, actually, something a lot of my students desire but often have a hard time finding opportunities to do.

Do you do any work in the classroom to prepare them for these interactions?

We try to do a lot of background work. For example, we learn about different kinds of buzzwords and different types of ideologies that might be latent within a given space or that might cause people to be triggered in a certain way.

And, when they meet with the church leaders directly, they’re encouraged to talk about some of the things that they see as challenges from their point of view and to ask the church leaders what might be good language to use to address these sticky points in a positive, constructive way. 

So far, the four church leaders that my student groups are working with have been very helpful in this regard. Obviously, you will never have perfectly neutral language but you can almost always find language that might bring down the temperature a bit.

Another thing that we’re starting this very week is to look at false narratives. For instance, in the global north and other parts of the US, these narratives often cast migrants in a certain light even if they are not based on statistical reality. 

My students do a lot of exercises thinking about these narratives and why/how they came to be and why/how they still exist. Then, we try to find ways to reconstruct them and use facts to understand which of them are false and how and to what extent racism and xenophobia are at play as well.

How do you see your students growing from the challenges they are dealing with in their project-based work?

I think there’s good growth potential because students are learning how big climate change is and how big the problems it’s causing are. Giving them the agency to learn how to develop a way to talk to people about these programs is giving them skills for the rest of their lives. 

Because, frankly, they will probably need to have these conversations for the rest of their lives. So, you need to be able to figure out how to be nimble enough to talk to different types of communities with different types of words if you want to actually get your message across.

It starts off sounding like a science-based challenge but then more and more sounds like a humanities-based one.

At the beginning, many think, well I just read all these books and I can just regurgitate the knowledge. Well, the person you’re talking to may not have the advantage of having read what you have. 

The students learn very quickly about the need to break information down and how to think alongside others in discussions. It is hard to figure out how to talk to people that you normally would not talk to. 

The humanities give you the tools you need to do that.

I love how you’re bringing a practical application to these theoretical discussions.

As a professor of religion, you’re a rare breed among Pando Days instructors so far. Could you perhaps talk a bit about how you see the connection between religion, sustainability, and climate change? 

Thanks for the question. I actually think that with a lot of climate-related issues, particularly when we think about the problems that climate consequences cause, questions of identity naturally arise. 

For instance, let’s say you are living in the global north, minding your own business and living your day-to-day life. Then, all of sudden, you learn that your day-to-day life has this huge carbon footprint, and it might be massively disrupting the lives of people around the equator or people in the Pacific Islands. 

That’s a huge identity problem because you felt like you were a moral person before you knew this. All of a sudden, you may start to get complicated feelings of guilt or uncertainty about yourself. This is actually quite common. 

I think that faith traditions can really engage in these questions of how do we understand identity, how do we understand what it means to be a good person. And there’s not a lot of easy answers. 

But, hopefully, faith traditions can play a role in helping people understand how to make good choices, what are bad choices, and how to advocate for those who are vulnerable and are in marginalized communities.

You see churches as a great starting point for this conversation?

While church attendance in its classical form is declining across the U.S., there are still millions of Americans who say that their churches are important to them. 

It is an interesting angle because we have to convince a lot of people that climate-related issues are happening and happening at such a scale that they demand urgent and expeditious action. I think this project can help get the language together to help people understand complicated things a little bit easier for the church-going demographic. 

Not everyone’s going to have the leisure of taking a class with me or getting to teach, but church-goers might still trust religious leaders in their communities. And if she or he says this is something important, maybe that could be helpful for the kind of “translation” that my students are doing to help people who don’t have the leisure to read about these issues.

You obviously are thinking in terms of a long time horizon. What is your vision for this project five years from now?

Hopefully, five years from now, I will be using this material to teach in my own church. And there’s a collection of churches here in Malibu that are interested in this topic in some form or fashion. 

It would be lovely to see some kind of official, published lesson plan series that churches could purchase and use broadly. 

And, then I would like to continue to be a sort of human resource for churches to complement the published materials.

Thanks Chris. Keep us posted on your work.

You’re welcome. Have a great day.