4.6 Laudate Deum review, with Christiana Zenner

Forum on Religion and Ecology: Spotlights

Christiana Zenner, PhD, returns to the podcast (see episode 4.3) for a discussion about Laudate Deum, the Apostolic Exhortation that Pope Francis recently issued as an update to his 2015 encyclical, Laudato Si': On Care for Our Common Home. We talk about some of the similarities and differences between the encyclical and the new exhortation. Some of the main themes include Pope Francis' use of scientific argumentation to refute climate denial, his critique of the United States as the world's leading carbon emitter per capita, his critique of what he calls the "technocratic paradigm" currently dominant around the globe (especially in the Global North), and his call for a global politics of multilateralism to address the climate crisis. We also discuss the usual absence of women from citations in these sorts of documents, which is remedied in Laudate Deum with a very strange reference to a well-known feminist scholar of science studies, Donna Haraway, who grew up Catholic but has taken highly critical stances toward Catholicism throughout her career. National Catholic Reporter featured an interview profile of Haraway in response to the citation, which you can find here.