Environmental Issues, the Environmental Movement, and Catholic Social Teaching

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This course will review the nature and history of environmental issues as they arose in the U.S. and in the international arena. In this context, it will then focus on the rise of religious environmentalism and the development of Catholic Social Teaching on the environment. In doing so, it will sketch the historical and theological foundations of Laudato si', the encyclical on environmental ethics and social justice issues by Pope Francis in 2015. Going beyond the realm of ideas, it will also treat the reception and implementation of the document – thereby illustrating the meaning of the document in the concrete historical circumstances of different societies. This course illustrates how Catholic Social Teaching and sociology illuminate one another. “In theory,” sociology is a social science that merely describes how society operates and how social processes influence one another. In point of fact, most sociologists do import values into their exercise of the discipline, and in America, the culture of the discipline largely takes a critical stance vis-à-vis social institutions, often treating how social forces constrain individual autonomy. As a result, when it comes to environmental issues, the discipline has well-honed resources for exploring questions of environmental justice (how particular groups are impacted by inequality), but it is less able to address or even articulate questions of the common good. In this respect, Catholic Social Teaching supplies what sociology lacks. It brings to bear a positive social ethic whose presuppositions are explicit and relevant to both the individual and the community. Meanwhile, sociology makes clear that the meaning of a Catholic Social Teaching is not simply noetic. Indeed, this course underscores that meaning always takes concrete form within particular social and historical circumstances. In other words, as the last two units of this course make clear, what Laudato si'; means in Poland is quite different from what it means in the Philippines.