A shift in religious ethics will help in the efforts to prevent climate change, former Vanderbilt University Divinity School professor Sallie McFague said Wednesday night at Harvard University.

About 70 students, professors and theologians attended McFague’s lecture titled ‘Cities, Climate Change, And Christianity: Religion and Sustainable Urbanism,’ in which McFague said people must overcome detachment from nature and apply and mold their religious viewpoints in order to better address climate change.

‘Religions are into the business of forming the imagination and thus influencing the action of people,’ she said. ‘It is at this point that I think religion can make a significant contribution to the planetary crisis.’

McFague said in order to stop climate change, a quantitative shift in mindset is needed. Religion, she said, can help enable this shift.

McFague also said people have to acknowledge their surroundings as products of nature in order to change their way of thinking and act as responsible stewards of that nature.

‘We have lost the sense that we are products of, sustained by and totally dependent on nature,’ she said.

City dwellers in particular have been disconnected from the traditional sense of nature because of their social and physical constructs, McFague said. It has become difficult for them to consider their actions as ones that directly affect the environment because their environment, though a product of nature, has been largely constructed by humanity.

McFague suggested that this is a dimension that must take center stage. She harkened back to the Greek concept of Kenosis, the ‘self-emptying’ of one’s own will, often used in Christian lore, and said the emptied will should be replaced by concern for those who are defenseless.

She said self-sacrifice of our own interests in order to preserve the world might be an ethos that could lead people to better environmental stewardship.

‘The prophetic model of Christianity insists that since the world is a body, it must be fed and cared for,’ she said. ‘All parts receive their just supply of resources and it must be sustained for the indefinite future.’

Susan Spilecki, who is pursuing a master’s in theology at the Episcopal Divinity School, said the adoption of a new ethic is a lot to ask of the religious community. The attempt to shift mindsets, she said, will be met with resistance ‘at the congregational level.’

Spilecki said she is currently focusing her own work on ‘how we in the religious community can bring this to the congregations [and] what can we do to equip pastors . . . lay leaders and the whole congregation in order to rethink the way they live.’

McFague said people don’t fully grasp our global responsibilities as a result of the context of our locally unaffected lives.

December’s climate change conference in Copenhagen, Denmark ‘does not look like it’s going to work,’ she said. ‘According to the paper this morning, things are not going in the right direction.’

However, she said people should never stop working towards the right direction.

‘Does this mean we should give up? I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘We carry on with what hope we have.’