Forefront Conversations with Mari Joerstad

What this episode covers

These days when people think about their relationships with land, it's often under the context of landownership: buying it, selling it, farming it, exploiting it. According to Dr. Mari Joerstad, the Israelites of the Old Testament would be horrified by our attitudes towards and interactions with the Earth. For Old Testament societies, owning and selling private land was just not a concept or practice like it is today. Dr. Joerstad talks to us about what the language in the Hebrew Bible says to us about the relationship that Israel had to the land and, in turn, to God and how that extended to the concept of being accountable to the land. We also get into a discussion about how contemporary concepts of landownership are so tied into identity of societies that it leads to armed conflict.  Joining this conversation is Amanda Clevinger, the leader of Forefront's Faith & Climate Change small group. ABOUT MARIDr. Joerstad is a biblical scholar, whose research focuses on ecology, land, migration and belonging in the Hebrew Bible. She received her BA from the University of Toronto, a Master of Religion from the Toronto School of Theology (Wycliffe College), and a PhD from Duke University, where she studied with Ellen Davis. A revised version of her dissertation, entitled The Hebrew Bible and Environmental Ethics: Humans, Nonhumans, and the Living Landscape, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2019. She has also published articles in journals like The Journal of Biblical Literature, Horizons in Biblical Theology, and The Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture. More recently, she has been a Research Associate at the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University, where she has provided support for the grant Facing the Anthropocene, lead by Norman Wirzba and Jedediah Purdy, and funded by the Henry Luce Foundation.

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