❖ IMPETUS/MOTIVATION
The Jubilee Year 2025 marks several epoch-making ecological causes: (i) 10th anniversary of the Papal encyclical Laudato Si’, (ii) 40th anniversary of the first-ever interreligious meeting on Nature Conservation at Assisi (1986), and (iii) 800th anniversary of St. Francis of Assisi’s celebrated Canticle of Creatures (1224). With an explicit desire to share common cause with such noble endeavors, the Pontifical Biblical Institute of the Gregorian University, together with the NExUS (Nurturing Exegetical Understanding of Scripture) initiative, is organizing a three-day conference (6-8 Nov 2025) to grant space to scholarly voices from across the world that engage Bible and Ecology, with a specific focus on neglected voices from the existential margins and their pertinent challenges for our biblical interpretation.
❖ DESCRIPTION
A warming world has irreversible implications for every inhabitant of the common home called the Earth, of which we humans form but a part. A growing ecological sensitivity therefore has rightly come to characterize our time. The clarion call from the first-ever Global Children’s Climate Summit in Nairobi (Sept 2023) is a case in point: “We stand at the crossroads of life or death, and our choices today will shape the world that the generations after [us will] inherit. Let us choose the path of justice, equality, and sustainability.” The urgent need to join this common cause can hardly be overstressed.
Ecological crises have detrimental implications, particularly for existential margins. Inspired by the biblical witness of a God who hears the cry of the poor and the exploited (cf. Exodus, Amos), the proposed international conference aims to create ample space for margins—both contextually (by bringing together less-privileged but ecologically-impacted global voices) and methodologically (ecological biblical hermeneutics in conversation with other exegetical methods and hermeneutical approaches). In these efforts at listening to, engaging with, and thus learning from each other, the conference will endeavor to usher in an awareness of and sensitivity to the multifaceted nature of the ecological issues and therefore the need for coordinated efforts towards an eco-biblical vision. The said vision will reiterate that, though ecologically wounded we are, together with our common home (cf. Laudato Si’), we can still dare to join globally peripheral voices as well as contexts for a healing vision of a new heaven and a new earth (cf. Ezekiel, Revelation).