How Religion Will Save the World

This past weekend, Western Christians celebrated Easter, the most important holiday of the liturgical year. Easter offers believers an opportunity to reflect on death, rebirth, and hope. This year it also came only two days before Earth Day (happy Earth Day!). Great, because some other news – mostly from the New York Times, admittedly never a wellspring of uplifting inspiration – reminds us that things aren’t all peachy for the Earth. With some experts placing the odds of total ecological collapse by midcentury at 50/50, it’s time to start mining our religious and spiritual traditions for all the hope and insight we can get. Among the most important of those insights is the concept of “sacred.” It may sound quaint, but history shows that without sacred values, human cultures just don’t work.

Calm down – I’m not claiming that religions will mumbo-jumbo away our problems. It’s going to be scientists, garage inventors, and daredevil investors who create sustainable energy infrastructures or tools for neutralizing atmospheric CO2. So rest assured, tech folks: your jobs are secure. We need you more than ever.