Climate Change as Apocalypse

Authors

  • Professor Gerbern S. Oegema McGill University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.26443/jcreor.v2i1.38

Abstract

The last couple of decades have revealed numerous consequences related to pollution and the impact of climate change. Natural disasters seem to have become part of our daily landscape; less than two years ago the whole continent of Australia was consumed by devastating forest fires, the Western part of the United States also experienced one of its worst wildfires in almost a century, while the ice cap in the North pole is melting and the permafrost of the Canadian and Russian tundra is disappearing. How can we deny the impacts of climate change as all of these catastrophes are unfolding before our very eyes? This conscious awareness of our planet’s rapid deterioration has generated a number of movies and fictional novels about the coming apocalypse, dystopian society and the end of the world. Demonstrating that there is a growing sentiment of worry and anxiety for the future of the planet and of humankind. In this article I propose to examine the anxieties surrounding the impact of climate change and its potential connection the apocalyptic literature.

Author Biography

Professor Gerbern S. Oegema, McGill University

Gerbern S. Oegema has been working in the field of Religious Studies and Adult Education since 30 years, in the Netherlands, Germany, Israel, the United States and now in Canada. Apart from being a professor of religion at McGill University, he was the founder and first director of the McGill Center for Research on Religion (CREOR) as well as the founder and first chair of the Council of theological Education in Montreal. With a deep knowledge of different religious sacred texts and traditions, he has a talent of bringing together people from different disciplines, faiths and cultures and unit them around a common goal. Apart from being a professor in religion, he is also an honorary faculty member of the Presbyterian College in Montreal, served on many committees and was the chair of the Graduate Committee for several years.

He studied Biblical Studies, Jewish Studies and New Testament and Early Judaism from 1977 to 1989 at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Freie Universität Berlin and the Universität Tübingen. From 1986 to 2001 he taught as lecturer, assistant professor and privatdozent at universities in Amsterdam, Berlin, Münster, and Tübingen. In 2002 he came to McGill University and joined the Faculty of Religious Studies, where he is now Professor of Biblical Studies. In 2003 and 2004 he was a scholar in residence at the Center for Theological Inquiry in Princeton, from 2004 to 2007 he held a SSHRC Insight grant and in 2015 and 2018 two SSHRC Connection grants. His research focuses on Second Temple Judaism, apocalypticism, the Pseudepigrapha, and Christian origins. He is the author and co-editor of more than twenty books, the editor of the Oxford Handbook of the Apocrypha, as well as the co-editor of several book series.

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Published

2020-12-30

How to Cite

Oegema, Gerbern S. 2020. “Climate Change As Apocalypse”. Journal of the Council for Research on Religion 2 (1). Montreal, QC, Canada:59-71. https://doi.org/10.26443/jcreor.v2i1.38.

Issue

Vol. 2 No. 1 (2020): Religion and Climate Change

Section

Articles

License

Copyright (c) 2020 Professor Gerbern S. Oegema

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.