SJU alumnus to speak on sustainability and resilience

Sam Thomas, a 1994 graduate of Saint John’s University and professor of religion at California Lutheran University, will present “From Sustainability to Resilience: Contributions from Religious Traditions” at 4:15 p.m.  Monday, Nov. 6, in Room 204A of the Gorecki Center at the College of Saint Benedict.  

The lecture, sponsored by the Jay Phillips Center for Interfaith Learning in collaboration with the CSB Sustainability Office, is free and open to the public.

“Religious communities have long used words like ‘stewardship’ and ‘creation care’ (among others) to describe attitudes and practices of concern for nature,” Thomas said. “More recently, the language of ‘sustainability’ has become the norm in secular environmental advocacy and activism, particularly on college campuses.”

Thomas explained that “as the realities and the extent of human-caused climate disruption, biodiversity loss, environmental injustice, desertification and other social and environmental disasters continue to unfold, the concepts of ‘resilience’ and ‘adaptability’ have emerged as more appropriate to the contemporary situation.”

In his lecture, which is part of the first day of CSB/SJU Sustainability Week, Thomas will weave together contributions from Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist and Native American perspectives to the emerging discourse about environmental resilience.

Thomas teaches courses in biblical studies, Jewish-Christian relations, environmental ethics, and religion and food at California Lutheran University, where he is the founding director of the SEEd Project (Sustainable Edible Education).  He also serves on the boards of Los Padres ForestWatch and Slow Food Ventura County.

As a student at SJU, Thomas majored in biology, planning to eventually study medicine. But while volunteering at L'Hopital Francais de St. Louis in Jerusalem after college, he discovered what would become a lasting fascination with the origins of Judaism and Christianity in Mediterranean antiquity.

Thomas earned a M.Div. degree from Yale University Divinity School in 2001, and in 2007 he earned a Ph.D. degree with a focus on Christianity and Judaism in antiquity from the University of Notre Dame. 

Thomas has written articles and books on the Dead Sea Scrolls, early Judaism and Christianity, religion and climate change and religion and food. He is a member of the current round of Anglican-Roman Catholic Consultation USA, the official dialogue between the Episcopal and Roman Catholic churches in the United States, for which he is drafting a paper on “ecological reconciliation.”