RT Article
T1 Children and Climate Anxiety: An Ecofeminist Practical Theological Perspective
JF Religions
VO 13
IS 4
A1 Mercer, Joyce Ann
LA English
PB MDPI
YR 2022
UL https://www.ixtheo.de/Record/180737579X
AB As awareness grows of global warming and ecological degradation, words such as "climate anxiety", and "eco-anxiety" enter our vocabularies, describing the impact of climate change on human mental health and spiritual wellbeing. Distress over climate change disproportionately impacts children, who also are more susceptible to the broader health, economic, and social effects brought about by environmental harm. In this paper, I explore children’s vulnerability to climate change and climate anxiety through the lens of ecofeminist practical theology. Ecofeminism brings the liberatory concerns of feminist theologies into engagement with those theologies focused on the life of the planet. Drawing on ecofeminism, practical theology must continue and deepen its own ecological conversion, and practical theologies of childhood must take seriously the work of making an ecological home, oikos, in which children are embedded as a part of the wider ecology that includes the more-than-human world. This requires foregrounding religious education with children toward the inhabitance of the earth in good and just ways. However, these theologies also must address children’s lived realities of increased anxiety over planetary changes that endanger life through practices of spiritual care with children that engage and support them in their distress toward participatory empowerment for change.
K1 child theology
K1 children and eco-anxiety
K1 climate anxiety
K1 climate education
K1 Ecotheology
K1 Feminist Theology
K1 Practical Theology
DO 10.3390/rel13040302