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‘[H]ow the knowledge generated from these relationships foster anarchist and liberative practices that create alternative epistemic pathways for a more just relationship to earth’
A Harvard Divinity School professor who currently teaches the course “American Religious Ecofascism” also taught a class on “the connection between Blackness and elements like water, trees […] and climate” last semester.
According to her faculty page, Nikki Hoskins “attends to Christian histories of colonial, racial, and environmental domination” and has been at HDS since July of 2024.
Her ecofascism course asserts “religion (and race) were central to the ecofascist manifestos” of various mass shooters, including those at a New Zealand mosque in 2019, a South Carolina black church in 2015, and a grocery store in a “predominantly Black [Buffalo, NY] neighborhood” in 2022.
In the course description, Hoskins contends “tactics typically linked to the far-right” include a “blending of climate action and resource preservation with antisemitism, antiblackness, Islamophobia, sexism, transphobia, and xenophobia.”
However, such is met on the left by advocacy “for the destruction of the earth to ‘level the playing field’ for all creatures.”
“These dangerous ideologies often masquerade as environmental consciousness,” the description reads. “While contemporary discussions frame such rhetoric as a reaction to the growing awareness of climate change, it has deeper historical roots, particularly visible in American religious writings.”
The course’s content is related to Hoskins’ other spring offering, “The Religious and Ecological Dimensions of Octavia Butler’s Parables.” Hoskins says science fiction author Butler is “known for her keen insights into ecological degradation, ecofascism, authoritarianism, and urban survival” in her “Parable” series of books.
The second book in that series, “Parable of the Talents,” follows “hyperempathic” protagonist Lauren Olamina in the “fledgling community [that] provides refuge for outcasts facing persecution after the election of an ultra-conservative president who vows to ‘make America great again.’”
Last fall, Hoskins taught “The Aquatic, Arboreal, and Atmospheric Life of Blackness” which “explore[d] the intersection of Black ecologies and Black religion and theology”:
The course investigates how the knowledge generated from these relationships foster anarchist and liberative practices that create alternative epistemic pathways for a more just relationship to earth, as well as counternarratives for challenging prevailing understandings of environmental concepts such as climate change, the Anthropocene, and extraction.
Hoskins other fall course, “Ethics for the Earth: Critical Approaches,” examined “critical environmental hermeneutical and ethical approaches alongside histories of Christian settler colonialism, environmental racism, and ecofascism.”
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