חיבור דתי: Religious Connection

To view the photo-rich magazine version, click here.

Originally appears in the Summer 2019 issue.

“Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”
– Albert Einstein

MY NAMES ARE Carissa McKinney, Tziporah Rachel and Tender One. I grew up in a, multicultural Jewish-Native American family in the suburbs of Boston. I went to Hebrew school, had a bat mitzvah and spent every 4th of July at the Mashpee Wampanoag Pow Wow with my family. Fast forward 10 years and, after falling away from my religion and culture for a while during college, I ended up working at a Jewish school as a science teacher and sharing my culture and experiences with students. Early on, I was faced with the question of how to teach evolution. More broadly, I had to consider how my deep-rooted feelings about ecological preservation aligned with or contradicted the Jewish beliefs taught in the Judaics classes. While I did not ultimately experience any resistance to teaching evolution, there was the possibility for conflict as the timescale of evolution (billions of years) and the timescale of creation in the Torah (six days) are vastly different. And so, I began a journey to understand the relationships between environmental science and faith and to create middle school science lessons to share with students (and now you).

Linking social and ecological ideas
Linking social and ecological ideas is imperative to the success of conservation efforts, especially on global-scale issues such as those addressed in the conservation of biodiversity.1 While looking at biodiversity from a global perspective, understanding the views and cultures of stakeholders in each area of interest is critical. Conservation is not a new idea. On the contrary, ideas of conservation have been around for generations in one form or another, from myths and legends to religions. We have been taught to care for the land that gives us life for many years and in many ways.