Join Dr Richard McNeill Douglas in exploring why we have failed to act on the warnings made by environmentalists five decades ago.

Since the Limits to Growth report was published in 1972 it has been widely known that a commitment to endless growth was putting us on course for environmental disaster—so why have we failed to take decisive political action in the half-century since then?

In this talk, Dr Richard McNeill Douglas will argue that the key to overcoming the blockages that prevent effective political action on the environment lies in theology – and in cultivating an expanded sense of what it means to be human.

Drawing on research in his new book, The Meaning of Growth, Douglas will present an argument as to why we have collectively failed to act on the warnings made by environmentalists five decades ago. Fundamentally, the idea of environmental limits undermines foundational principles of modernity – to be understood as a kind of secular religion – without offering an alternative faith that could act as its replacement.

Without looking at things on this level, Douglas will suggest, political inaction on the environment appears mysterious, and the prospects for effective political action almost hopeless. What we need, he believes, is to understand that there are three dimensions to environmental crisis.

The first is physical – these are the increasingly undeniable impacts of human activity on global ecosystems, and the increasing impacts these are having on our lives in return. The second is political – manifests itself in increasingly irrational denialism and breakdown of a shared understanding of public reality. The third is spiritual – our spiritual incoherence in a modern secular age that is itself losing coherence and belief in its foundations and future.

But it’s on this spiritual level that we need to turn and from where practical progress has a genuine chance of springing: ultimately, Douglas will suggest, the time is ripe for a kind of inversion of William Temple’s injection of Christian ethics into social policy. It is social policy that needs to become spiritualised now, since the progress we need cannot be realised in material terms as before.

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In this podcast Matthew Barber-Rowell interviews Professor Martyn Percy about his new book, The Crisis of Colonial Anglicanism: Empire Slavery and Revolt in the Church of England. This dialogue explores the issues covered in the book, including, the roots of the Anglican Church, the serious fictions that have both shaped and blighted the church, and the new maps and stories that might help to acknowledge the extent of the Communion and the future directions of travel.

In episode 2 of the Radical Hope Podcast, Matthew Barber-Rowell interviews Rev Dr Jesse Zink about his book, Faithful Creative, Hopeful: Fifteen Theses for Christians in a Crisis-Shaped World

The Rev. Dr. Jesse Zink is principal of Montreal Diocesan Theological College and canon theologian in the Diocese of Montreal. In those roles, he teaches at McGill University and in the Montreal School of Theology consortium, while also relating broadly to churches in Canada and the United States. His latest book, Faithful, Hopeful, Creative: 15 Theses for Christian Witness in a Crisis-Shaped World was published in fall 2024.