Cultivating Empathy for Earth: Integrating Empathy into Ecological Religious Education

Religious educators increasingly recognize that commitments to ecological care and conservation depend upon more than good information; they also require affective experiences with the earth. While this has led many to integrate practices of wonder, appreciation, and reverence for the natural world into their pedagogies, few religious educators have explored how empathy can inspire greater care for the planet. This paper thus brings Christian theological perspectives on empathy into conversation with empathy studies from social neuroscience and ecological psychology, with the goal of showing how integrating empathy into religious educational practice can foster ecological understanding and pro-environmental action.