Public Lecture: Religion, Values, and Climate Change
Joel Robbins is the Sigrid Rausing Professor of Social Anthropology at Cambridge. He has broad interests in the anthropology of ethics and values, the anthropology of religion, and anthropological theory. His publications include the books Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society and Theology and the Anthropology of Christian Life, and numerous edited volumes, including most recently Where is the Good in the World: Ethical Life Between Social Theory and Philosophy.
School of Critical Studies
Date: Wednesday 06 May 2026
Time: 16:00 - 17:30
Venue: James McClune Smith Building, Room 639
Category: Public lectures, Academic events
Speaker: Professor Joel Robbins
Document: Joel Robbins poster
Many people have come to the conclusion that simply sharing the scientific data on global warming with the public has not been enough to motivate the kind of consistent action that would be needed to successfully address the threat it presents. In this lecture I consider whether religion might have some unique role to play in bringing such action about. At the core of my argument are the claims that religions often transform everyday understandings of temporality and that notions of temporality in turn profoundly shape the way people approach realizing the values they hold, including those related to climate change. In light of these claims, I suggest that religion can play a role in fostering climate action that many other institutions have not been able to play successfully. Throughout the lecture, I draw on work in the anthropology of religion and time, one the one hand, and in the philosophy of values, on the other, to build my argument.