3 research outputs found

    Laudato Siā€™ and Integral Ecology: A Reconceptualization of Sustainability

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    This study analyzes sustainability concepts through the lens of Roman Catholic Social Teaching (CST) with a special emphasis on Laudato Siā€™. CST expands the focus of sustainability to include social justice through its emphasis on human dignity, the common good, and caritas. In CST, justice is understood as structural while environmental obligations are connected to integral human development and peace. In Laudato Siā€™, Pope Francis calls on us to counter prevailing unjust systems with a structural reordering of multiple ecologies: environmental, economic, social, cultural, and daily life. Based on this reordering, he developed the notion of integral ecology, and we show how it encompasses a set of existing sustainability ideas in CST and, more importantly, how it changes the focus and scope of sustainability. Unfortunately, and despite supposed good intentions, some institutions misrepresent and use the term ā€œsustainabilityā€ to justify systems that result in ā€œun sustainableā€ consequences. We thus show how Laudato Siā€™ offers an antidote to such unsustainable practices by reconceptualizing the sustainability construct through the notion of integral ecology

    Laudato Siā€™ and Integral Ecology: A Reconceptualization of Sustainability

    Get PDF
    This study analyzes sustainability concepts through the lens of Roman Catholic Social Teaching (CST) with a special emphasis on Laudato Siā€™. CST expands the focus of sustainability to include social justice through its emphasis on human dignity, the common good, and caritas. In CST, justice is understood as structural while environmental obligations are connected to integral human development and peace. In Laudato Siā€™, Pope Francis calls on us to counter prevailing unjust systems with a structural reordering of multiple ecologies: environmental, economic, social, cultural, and daily life. Based on this reordering, he developed the notion of integral ecology, and we show how it encompasses a set of existing sustainability ideas in CST and, more importantly, how it changes the focus and scope of sustainability. Unfortunately, and despite supposed good intentions, some institutions misrepresent and use the term ā€œsustainabilityā€ to justify systems that result in ā€œun sustainableā€ consequences. We thus show how Laudato Siā€™ offers an antidote to such unsustainable practices by reconceptualizing the sustainability construct through the notion of integral ecology
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