Nashville, TN: The Vanderbilt Center for Sustainability, Energy and Climate (VSEC) selected Dr. Joerg Rieger to receive generous grant funding for research into climate adaptation and resiliency in religious institutions/communities. Dr. Joerg Rieger was awarded a $300,000 grant, dispersed over two years, from VSEC.
Malchevska Studio/AdobeStock
Photo Credit: John David Hughes, Manchester Diocese Eco-Diocese, Facebook (2018)
This research project explores the role of religious institutions in North America as sites of climate adaptation and resiliency amidst eco-anxiety and ecological change.
The basic hypothesis we want to test and deepen in the research to follow is that North American religious institutions are premier sites for exploring eco-resiliency within “third spaces,” places that are neither work nor living spaces.
Through evidence-based ethnographic qualitative and quantitative measures, this research will explore how congregations can equip their leaders to adapt to the social and psychological distress caused by the uncertain and often uncontrollable entanglement of human and natural forces.
Researchers will create a specialized Solidarity Circle curriculum focused on climate-science in conversation with the study of religion and theology, designed to provide clergy and faith leaders with critical insights into climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies.
Researchers will conduct a series of ethnographic interviews and implement several research instruments to Solidarity Circle participants.
Implementation of eco-justice focused track of Solidarity Circles that adopt particular projects of resiliency that are specific to the contexts of individual faith communities.
Distinguished Professor of Theology and the Cal Turner Chancellor’s Chair of Wesleyan Studies at Vanderbilt University and Vanderbilt Divinity School
Joerg is also the founding director of the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice. Previously, he was the Wendland-Cook Endowed Professor of Constructive Theology at Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University. He received an M.Div. from the Theologische Hochschule Reutlingen, Germany, a Th.M. from Duke Divinity School, and a Ph.D. in religion and ethics from Duke University.
For more than three decades he has worked to bring together theology and the struggles for justice and liberation that mark our age. His work addresses the relation of theology and public life, reflecting on the misuse of power in religion, politics, and economics. His main interest is in developments and movements that bring about change and in the positive contributions of religion and theology. His constructive work in theology draws on a wide range of historical and contemporary traditions, with a concern for manifestations of the divine in the pressures of everyday life
Selected Publications
Liberating People, Planet, and Religion (2024)
Theology in the Capitalocene: Ecology, Identity, Class, and Solidarity (2023)
Jesus vs. Caesar: For People Tired of Serving the Wrong God (2018)
Assistant Professor of Chaplaincy and Spiritual Care, Iliff School of Theology
Rev. Dr. George Schmidt is the husband of Rev. Larissa Romero and the father of Frida and Colwyn Romero-Schmidt. He was born in southern Indiana along the banks of the Ohio River, and he brings over a decade of chaplaincy experience with him to Iliff, having operated in military, prison, and hospital contexts. He is ordained with the Disciples of Christ.
Before Iliff, he was the Senior Teaching Fellow with Vanderbilt Divinity School’s Doctor of Ministry Program in Integrative Chaplaincy and the Graduate Research Fellow with the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice. He currently serves as a Lieutenant Commander and supervisory chaplain in the Navy Chaplain Corps, where he operates with the III Marine Expeditionary Force out of Okinawa.
His scholarship is not only grounded in his work as a chaplain but also in his many years in community organizing. He has worked on campaigns ranging from housing justice and prison abolition to struggles for labor rights that build economic democracy while undoing racial capitalism. His current work seeks to amplify spiritual care’s capacity to, in the words of Adorno, “allow suffering to speak” for the purposes of liberative social practices, turning private grief into public witness. This essentially links the core competencies of chaplaincy with the commitments of liberation theology, which he is calling emancipatory chaplaincy.
George completed his MDiv at Union Theological Seminary under the advisement of Dr. James Cone, and finished his PhD at Vanderbilt University under the direction of Dr. Joerg Rieger.
Assistant Professor of Social Ethics and Community Leadership, Director of Institutional Effectiveness and Academic Assessment at Saint Paul School of Theology
Aaron is an ordained Teaching Elder in the PC(USA), and was most recently the Associate Presbyter of Congregational Vitality at Heartland Presbytery. Prior to that, Aaron was the Associate Director of the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice at Vanderbilt Divinity School. He has also been the Executive Director and then Special Advisor of Religions for Peace USA, where he helped launch a national anti-Islamophobia program based in the southeast, along with organizing national senior religious leaders on issues of common concern such as mass incarceration, immigration and climate change. Before his doctoral work, Aaron was an organizer with the Industrial Areas Foundation in San Antonio, Tx.
Organizing Visions: Social Ethics and Broad-based Solidarity Activism (2025)
Taeha is a Ph.D. student in the Graduate Department of Religion at Vanderbilt University. His academic work centers on theological and philosophical anthropology, discourses on progress and secularization, and postcolonial ethics and politics. Before coming to Nashville, he earned an MA in Religion with a concentration in Ethics from Yale University, and a BA in Theology and Religious Studies from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. As a Wendland-Cook fellow, he seeks to explore various soteriologies at work in the intersections of religion, economics, and ecology--however implicit, hidden, or "secular" they may claim to be.
Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies at the University of North Texas.
Of Modern Extraction: Experiments in Critical Petro-theologies (2022)
Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Lansing Community College'
Director of Doctor of Ministry and Lay and Continuing Education Programs and Adjunct Professor at Lexington Theological Seminary
The Green Good News: Christ’s Path to Sustainable and Joyful Life (2020)
Robert and Marilyn Degler McClean Associate Professor of Ecological Theology and Practice and Director of the Center for Ecological Regeneration at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary
Professor, Department of Human and Organizational Development at Vanderbilt University
Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Vanderbilt University
