37th Hannah A. Quint lecture: Compost Theology, Jewish Thought & The Climate Crisis. Mara Benjamin, Mt. Holyoke College

Compost Theology

The urgency of action to decarbonize and mitigate the worst effects of planetary disorder is clear to most of us by now. Changing our ecological trajectory depends not only on large- and small-scale practices, however, but also on shifting how we conceptualize the world. Mara Benjamin explores how dirty and decomposing matter offers a pungent way in. She suggests the humble backyard compost pile proffers a theological-ecological site in which new life rises from the dead.

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 poses to Jewish theology.