Studies in Christian Ethics: Climate change

The February 2011 edition of the journal Studies in Christian Ethics is now available, and contains papers published from the proceedings of the annual conference of the Society for the Study of Christian Ethics held in September last year on the topic of climate change. The table of contents is available here, though you'll need to be a subscriber to SAGE to be able to see it (which for most people means accessing through a university or college).

My contribution is a piece called "Doom, Gloom and Empty Tombs: Climate Change and Fear". I don't think I'm being naughty to post the abstract.

Abstract: Anthropogenic climate change represents a deep and credible threat to human society in a variety of ways. The particular shape of this threat is historically novel and commonly associated with experiences of fear mixed with both guilt and impotence. What is the moral significance of this fear in a faithful Christian response to anthropogenic climate change? How is the Christian ethicist to locate fears of climate change? How can such fears become constructive for, rather than destructive of, ethical thought? Taking Hans Urs von Balthasar’s short text, The Christian and Anxiety, as a dialogue partner, this paper will explore healthy and unhealthy modes of alarm in the face of an increasingly disrupted climate. Balthasar argues that Christ’s own anxiety during his passion liberates believers from certain kinds of fear, and then opens the creative possibility of entering into the fears of one’s neighbour as an expression of love.
Small minds may be amused by the fact that I managed to get a rude word published in an ethics journal (twice: pp. 78-79). I considered giving this post the title "How to get shit published", but then rejected it as puerile.

UPDATE: I have now received the published PDF of the article and am happy to consider sharing it on a personal basis upon request.