ABOUT THE EVENT

2026 Spring Shapiro Lecture | Mara H. Benjamin, Ph. D.

Dominion, Stewardship and Other Ways of Being Earthling

Many contemporary religious communities have increasingly prioritized climate action as a calling and a responsibility. Yet the classical teachings of Western traditions on the created world can hinder undertaking the climate action we need now. This lecture explores different ways Jewish sources imagine human beings in the created world. It then examines how the urgent work of responding to ecological crisis generates new questions for, and approaches to, religious traditions.

Mara H. Benjamin, a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow, is Irene Kaplan Leiwant Professor and Chair of Jewish Studies at Mount Holyoke College. She is a scholar of modern Jewish religious thought and a constructive Jewish theologian. Benjamin’s 2018 book, “The Obligated Self: Maternal Subjectivity and Jewish Thought”, received the 2019 American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion, Constructive-Reflective category. She is also the author of Rosenzweig’s Bible: “Reinventing Scripture for Jewish Modernity (2009)”. Her current project analyzes the profound challenges ecological crisis pose to Jewish theology.