Navigating Climate Spiritual Care

Are you interested in Navigating Climate Spiritual Care: A Learning Community but still wondering if this offering is right for you? Click below to view the recording of our "Taste of Navigating Climate Spiritual Care" conversation. You'll get a chance to meet the hosts of the Navigating Climate Spiritual Care Learning Community, Rev. Alison Cornish and Nicholas Collura, find out more about the Learning Community and to hear the questions others raised. 

CEU Track

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.

Nicholas Collura currently directs the Radius program for ethical reflection on technology and culture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he also serves as a campus chaplain. Prior to his time at MIT, he trained as a board-certified healthcare chaplain and worked in both caregiving and supervisory roles in palliative care and hospice for several years in Philadelphia. There, he also co-founded and co-coordinated EcoPhilly, a faith-based organizing initiative dedicated to creation care in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Philadelphia.

Nicholas is a trained and practicing spiritual director who is certified as a teacher in the Narrative Enneagram Tradition. He earned his Doctor of Ministry degree from Fordham University and is an adjunct lecturer in Villanova University's Master's program in pastoral care, where he teaches The Spirituality of Care and Human Growth and Faith Development. Additionally, he offers retreats and workshops on eco-spirituality, the political context of spiritual care, Ignatian spirituality, and other topics. His early education was in film studies and comparative literature, and he retains an avid interest in the arts and a respect for the wisdom of the creative imagination.