Center Overview
The Center for Climate Justice and Faith empowers leaders to cultivate moral, spiritual, and practical power for the work of climate justice in communities of faith and in collaboration with others.
The Center for Climate Justice and Faith empowers leaders to cultivate moral, spiritual, and practical power for the work of climate justice in communities of faith and in collaboration with others. The Center is an initiative of Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary, a graduate school of California Lutheran University and a member of the Graduate Theological Union.
Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary has long been on the forefront of linking faith in Jesus Christ to the quest of social justice. Today, environmental degradation — and in particular climate change — is a ferocious engine of racial injustice and economic injustice. The people ravaged or killed by climate change (who will measure in the hundreds of millions) are and will be disproportionality people of color and economically impoverished people, while those who cause climate change are primarily the world’s high consumers.
Our moment in time is breathtaking… pivotal. Today’s adults and young adults will determine whether climate catastrophe in its worst forms will be averted. Lutherans claim that God created a world that is tov (Hebrew word translated as “good” in Genesis, but more specifically a good that is life-generating). Yet the world’s high consuming people now threaten that very tov, Earth’s capacity to generate and re-generate life. We have become the “un-creators.”
The PLTS Center for Climate Justice and Faith, along with ecumenical and interfaith partners, seeks to reverse that trend – to equip people for the joy of healing and transformation.
