A Greenhouse Research Talk by Kiara Jorgenson, Associate Professor of Religion & Environmental Studies at St. Olaf College (Minnesota, USA)
With the tap of a screen, children and young adults have extraordinary access to information, diverse perspectives, and opportunity. Research also shows the young among us are chronically enclosed. Confined by overscheduled lives, “safe: toys and playgrounds, screen-based relationships, and hovering parents, youth under the age of 25 spend 50% less time experiencing the natural world than previous generations. Most are neither wild nor free. In this lecture, Dr. Kiara Jorgenson examines the spiritual ramifications of such enclosures alongside emergent science on the benefits of sustained nature access and considers how traditions within Christianity, past and present, might address them.
Kiara Jorgenson (she/her) is Associate Professor of Religion & Environmental Studiesat St. Olaf College, MN/USA. An ecotheologian by training, Kiara’s studies and writes on Protestant ecotheologies, ecofeminisms, childhood studies, and ecological resistance movements. A rostered clergywoman in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, she is the author of Ecology of Vocation: Recasting Calling in a New Planetary Era (Fortress/Lexington, 2020) and editor of Ecotheology: A Christian Conversation (Eerdmans, 2020). Kiara is currently working on two book projects: an ecotheological constructive reading of Martin Luther’s anthropology and a popular work on nature, wonder, and the spiritual questing of children.