Katharine Wilkinson has been interested in the environment and religion's role in culture since her undergraduate years at Sewanee: The University of the South. So when the Rhodes Scholar began studying for a Ph.D. in environmental studies at Oxford University, she paired the two to study the evangelical community's discussions of climate change.
Wilkinson's published dissertation, Between God and Green: How Evangelicals Are Cultivating a Middle Ground on Climate Change (Oxford University Press), outlines the history of the climate change discussion within evangelicalism, centering around the Evangelical Climate Initiative's 2006 document, "Climate Change: An Evangelical Call to Action." That document had a number of well-known evangelical signatories and, Wilkinson argues, served as a "watershed document" in setting the tone for current climate change discussions in the evangelical church.
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