“Laudato Si’ as a flashpoint: How Catholicism is shaping an ecological citizenship”

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Education in the Era of Interconnectedness and Complexities.

Proposal

Laudato Si’, the famous ecologic Catholic encyclical is analyzed as a flashpoint in Western anthropocentric subjectivity. From a specific notion of interconnection, the text describes the current moment as a crossroad between a consumerist lifestyle or an ecological one that acknowledges the earth as a common house. This study aims to follow Foucault's intuition exploring how a non-institutional notion of religion shapes the ways we see, live, and act in politics. In contrast to enlightenment traditions that tended to place religion outside the borders of “the political” (Sorkin, 2008; Masuzawa, 2005) the goal of the research is to consider how catholic narratives are shaping the conditions that make possible the ecological citizenship as a complex assemblage that includes: a. an understanding of interconnectedness based upon a relational ontology; b., a social accountability constructed with four metaphysical statements; c. a technology of the self-such as the “new” ecological sin; d. emerging educational pedagogies such as Ecological Restoration Education. Everything is interconnected, states pope Francis in his Laudato Si’ (2015) encyclical. The study is dedicated to thinking through and beyond religion as a cultural practice that flows between technologies and pedagogical discourses connecting seemingly opposite worldviews through shaping specific subjectivities. Religious narratives are a crucial transphilosophical issue that give intelligibility to pedagogical principles in the making of the ecological citizen and its new lifestyle. The paper examines the emergence of unexpected technologies such as environmental education, ecological ethics, and ecological conversion as thinkable through a religious gaze. Acknowledging the complex, though thick, ways in which Christian interconnection is forged, and perceived it is of utmost importance to understand the effects that are produced in educational policies all around the world. The analysis provides a way to consider the complexity through which apparently secular discourses overlap and (re)connect with religious ones in the making of the ecological citizen. The ways that religious catholic principles enact ecological citizenship is crucial since it implies modalities of living and interacting that have effects at a global scale. In 2019 there were just under 1,345 million Catholics, while the presence of baptized Catholics in the world remains stable around 17.7% (L’Osservatore Romano, 2021). According to the Global Catholic Education Report (2020) Catholic schools serve 62.2 million students globally at the preschool, primary, and secondary levels being the largest non-governmental school network in the world.

Author

• Ezequiel Gomez Caride, Universidad De San Andrés