Climate Change and the Chaplain’s Presence
Offered by The BTS Center & the Chaplaincy Innovation Lab
Occurred on Tuesday, October 10, 2023
As the effects of climate change continue to grow in scope and impact, more people are struggling with the mental, emotional, and spiritual challenges of these times — whether in direct experience of extreme weather or through the experience of anxiety and grief (or, often, both). Our skills as chaplains are needed in these emerging contexts, and we can serve a role in helping others to address and adapt to these global crises.
Thank you to those who joined us for this online seminar in which Chaplain Liz Olson shared her work supporting a climate action group over the past seven years as well as learnings from how local chaplains responded when a wildfire swept through their rural Oregon community.
View the online seminar, recorded on October 10, 2023 below:
Meet Rev. Liz Olson
Rev. Liz Olson is a Board Certified Chaplain and serves as a Spiritual Health specialist for an in-patient Palliative Care team at Providence Medford Medical Center in Oregon. Previously she created a training program in Spiritual Care at the Rogue Valley Manor in Medford. She received her Masters of Divinity from Starr King School for the Ministry in Berkeley, CA and is an Associate Minister-at-Large for The Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples in San Francisco — an inter-faith, inter-racial church co-founded by Dr. Howard Thurman. Liz is passionate about addressing the climate crisis and is on the board of directors for Southern Oregon Climate Action Now where she headed up the documentary Voices of the Valley and co-facilitates the support group Sustaining Climate Activists.
Meet Our Hosts
Rev. Alison Cornish
The Rev. Alison Cornish serves as the Coordinator of the Chaplaincy Initiative at the BTS Center. Alison spent the first half of her professional life working as an historic preservationist and architectural historian, primarily in New England and on Long Island, NY. After 20 years of work with museums, municipalities and nonprofit organizations, Alison attended Andover Newton Theological Seminary in response to a felt sense of call directly from Earth to address what is it that we are doing in our daily lives and habits that is destroying the planet that we inhabit. Following CPE, field education in interfaith work and parish ministry, and ordination in the Unitarian Universalist tradition, Alison served congregations on Long Island while also embarking on studies with the Buddhist teacher Joanna Macy and Dominican sister Miriam McGillis. Alison became a GreenFaith Fellow in 2013, and a Climate Reality Project presenter in 2017. She has served as Senior Director of Programs at Partners for Sacred Places, Executive Director of Pennsylvania Interfaith Power & Light, Director of Seminary and Congregational Initiatives at Interfaith Philadelphia, and as the Affiliated Community Minister at First Unitarian Church, Philadelphia. Alison’s facilitation work includes the Work That Reconnects, training-the-trainers for Civil Conversations, group practice of Nonviolent Communication, and the curriculum “Healthy Congregations.” A Program Consultant for the BTS Center since 2021, her work has focused on ecological and climate grief, religious imagination, and chaplaincy in a climate-changed world. Alison and her husband Pat live in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, on the unceded lands of the Nipmuc and Pocumtuc peoples, in the watershed of the Connecticut River. When not working, Alison can be found along, on, and in, a local natural body of water, currently the Deerfield River.
Michael Skaggs, PhD
Michael Skaggs, PhD is Director of Programs of the Chaplaincy Innovation Lab, overseeing the Lab’s education and networking initiatives as well as public relations. He is the host and producer of the Lab’s webinar series and editor of the Lab’s eBook series and newsletter.
Trained at the University of Notre Dame as a historian of American religion, Michael has a particular interest in interfaith dialogue and has served in innovative theological education programs. His work has appeared in Sociology of Religion, International Journal of Maritime History, American Catholic Studies, U.S. Catholic Historian, Books & Culture, and elsewhere. He previously served as Communications Director for Transforming Chaplaincy.
Meet Chaplaincy Innovation Lab
The Chaplaincy Innovation Lab (CIL), based at Brandeis University, launched in October 2018 to bring chaplains, theological educators, clinical educators and social scientists into conversation about the work of chaplaincy and spiritual care. As religious and spiritual life continues to change, the CIL sparks practical innovations that enable chaplains to nurture the spirits of those they serve and reduce human suffering.
Meet The BTS Center
With roots dating back to 1814, The BTS Center is a private foundation in Portland, Maine, building on the legacy of the former Bangor Theological Seminary. Today The BTS Center seeks to catalyze spiritual imagination, with enduring wisdom, for transformative faith leadership. Guided by the vision of human hearts renewed, justice established, and creation restored, The BTS Center offers theologically grounded workshops and retreats, learning cohorts, courses, public conversations, and projects of applied research, all focused around spiritual leadership for a climate-changed world.
