Project description
Currently, there is talk of climate change and its consequences in terms of a global mega-crisis, which makes ecological transformation processes urgently necessary. However, as environmental awareness research shows, such ecological transformations are not possible without social changes, in order to ultimately lead to changes in attitudes and behavior.
The starting point is therefore the interconnectedness of religion as a social system and its interaction with contextual ecological systems, since faith in the sense of religious affiliation determines mentalities and thus also shapes environmental awareness. This can and must be seen in ambivalent terms – comparable to the issues of ‘war and peace’: Religions are not per se conducive to peace or awareness-raising in terms of environmental ethics. On the contrary, history has repeatedly shown the opposite.
Nevertheless, the so-called world religions have immense potential for the preservation of creation (here especially with regard to the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam) or the appreciation of nature in the sense of a nature-based spirituality (more in the context of Far Eastern religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism) in recourse to the texts regarded as sacred.
Objectives
Interreligious learning is to be (re)designed through impulses from international cooperation for teacher training in such a way that nature and climate protection, climate resilience promotion and reflection on climate justice are integrated into educational efforts as subject areas in order to promote urgently needed ecological transformation processes not only in the sense of promoting environmental knowledge, but also for joint environmental ethical awareness-raising.
Implementation
On the basis of information transfer, discourses and reflections on theological foundations and environmental-ethical, context-related approaches in dealing with nature conservation and climate change, the practice of training and further education of teachers (of all disciplines) is professionalized in such a way that interreligious cooperation on environmental education is transferred into school practice (didactic concepts, team teaching, joint teaching materials)
