News

Joy, Rest, and the Work of Ethics

By Sarah E. Fredericks Associate Professor of Environmental Ethics | May 1, 2026

Professor Sarah E. Fredericks examines climate change, moral emotion, and the expanding horizons of religious ethics at Swift Hall.

Looking back to the 1967 volume of Criterion celebrating the centennial of the Divinity School, I recognize that the faculty then may have agreed with some aspects of my vision of ethics; however, my work and my self did not fit into the mid-century study of religion in at least four ways. It is from within this evolving institutional context, and this expansion of perspectives and topics, that I reflect on the 100^th anniversary of Swift Hall's presence on the University of Chicago’s Hyde Park campus.

First, by training: I am not a Christian minister like so many, if not most, of the people writing in 1967. Indeed, while heavily informed by Christian ethics, I have primarily studied the implicit ethics of “secular” documents, whether sustainability metrics or popular environmental literature, albeit using a religious lens to understand new implicit religion and ethics.

Second, by field: religious ethics was emerging as a discipline distinct from Christian ethics, but was in its infancy in the mid-twentieth century.

Third, by subfield: environmental ethics did not yet exist in 1967.

Fourth, personally: there were no full-time women professors at the Divinity School when the aforementioned volume of Criterion was written. Yet as I write this in the 2025-26 academic year, the Divinity School’s ethics faculty comprises three tenured or tenure-track members, all of whom are women, including myself. Each represents a different academic generation; each specializes in Jewish, Christian, or Islamic ethics; and each examines ethics within a tradition, through historical perspectives, and in contemporary culture. This triad studies bioethics, political ethics, and environmental ethics, engaging with a wide range of disciplines and communities.

I understand ethics as the study of what it means for humans to flourish, how we can and should help bring about such conditions, and why human action may inhibit flourishing. Religious ethics also includes the study of how human flourishing interacts with, and depends on, the flourishing of the rest of the world, including nonhuman creatures and ecosystems.

To study such questions, ethicists need to consider all that encompasses what it means to be human. This assessment is inherently interdisciplinary and may draw on any discipline. Furthermore, scholars need to be open to learning from and with people outside the academy—religious leaders, activists, and everyday people around the world. Finally, this knowledge should come not only from empirical observations or rational analyses, but also from narrative, ritual, emotional, and embodied experience, the analysis of which can provide insight into how human values interact with the world.

While ethics must attend to all dimensions of human life, I focus on those that are understudied. Attention to these overlooked dimensions allows for a more comprehensive vision of what it means to flourish as humans and how to bring about that flourishing. Let me turn to an example from my own work.

In Environmental Guilt and Shame (Oxford, 2021), I document the existence of these moral emotions and the emerging religious responses to them, recognizing that ethicists had overlooked the lived experience of guilt and shame resulting from global climate change. My colleagues’ philosophical notions of hyperrationalized individual agency could not account for the culpability and disgrace rooted in and capable of sparking collective action. Thus, the field was ignoring a key hindrance to environmental action among those most committed to environmental concerns.

Drawing on an interdisciplinary suite of resources, I developed a theory of collective agency and responsibility that encompasses diffuse collectives—such as people in rich nations— that primarily contribute to climate change. This approach takes the concerns of those experiencing environmental shame seriously and expands ethical frameworks. I also developed guidelines, informed by theories of religious ritual and ethics, for addressing that moral burden in communities.

More recently, I have investigated what it means to live well amid climate change, which is here and will be here for our whole lives. While the phenomenon is rightly described as an urgent crisis, remaining in crisis mode for decades does not seem conducive to human flourishing. This was evident at the beginning of the decade, during the COVID-19 pandemic, when so many “essential” workers and others suffered under a state of emergency for months and even years. How, then, do we live well over a lifetime of extreme weather events, rising temperatures, and resource depletion?

While there are many dimensions of a good life, I investigate this question through two aspects of human life underutilized in ethics: joy and rest. What does it mean to take joy and rest seriously, not as a bonus or a luxury after basic needs are met, but as fundamental to flourishing? What might this do for human ethics and for the understanding of action during climate change?

As I undertake this investigation, I have been broadening the scope of my interlocutors. All too often, my education and research have centered on white, able-bodied, middle- to upper-class, generally male perspectives of Christians or people who were embedded in Christian cultures—people who typically hold significant power in society. Yet this focus can discount the dignity and ethical knowledge of others and risks producing a vision of joy, rest, and action that is, at best, tone-deaf in a world rife with systemic injustice. Thus, I’ve been reading widely, slowly, carefully, to expand my research questions and perspective.

For example, Kyle Powys Whyte, a philosopher and enrolled member of the Potawatomi Nation, writes with his colleagues that climate change is not a new, unprecedented event as so many environmentalists describe it. Rather, it is a continuation of colonialism, industrialization, racism, sexism, and other modern problems. Viewing climate change in this way reveals historical truths while opening new avenues for responding to this existential threat.

Another striking example came from an interview between Naomi Ortiz, a “disabled Mestize writer and visual artist,” and Julia Watts-Belser, a disabled, queer rabbi and scholar of Jewish ethics. Ortiz distinguishes healing and mending—the former a quest for control, perfection, and resolution, whereas the latter is a process of change in which scars of harm persist and shape the future. This terminological shift invites a rethinking of the aim of climate ethics, which too often has sought to restore some perfect past rather than address the reality of the present moment. I find myself wondering whether joy, rest, and action are more possible in a mended world than in one where humans long for healing that is not coming in this lifetime.

While I’ve focused this essay on my vision of ethics and how my scholarship embodies it, I note that we are on the cusp of a new era in religious ethics at the Divinity School. Just as a new century awaits Swift Hall, I wonder what might be possible with this expansion of ethics to make sense of and promote human flourishing, and I am delighted to be a part of the journey to discover the answers with my amazing colleagues and students.

Bibliography

"Mending and Witnessing: The Practice of Desert Kinship: Naomi Ortiz in Conversation with Julia Watts Belser." Disability and Climate Change Public Archive Project, Updated July 1, 2022; accessed 2025. https://disabilityclimatechange.georgetown.domains/mending-witnessing/.

Powys Whyte, Kyle. "Is It Colonial Deja Vu? Indigenous Peoples and Climate Justice." In Humanities for the Environment: Integrating Knowledge, Forging New Constellations of Practice, edited by Joni Adamson and Michael Davis, 88–105. New York: Routledge, 2017.

Footnotes

^Anne Carr joined the faculty July 1, 1975, when she became an Assistant Professor of Theology and Assistant Dean who served as a liaison to the College program in Religion and Humanities. She was the first woman who was a full-time professor at the Divinity School and the first to earn tenure.
^Kyle Powys Whyte, "Is It Colonial Deja Vu? Indigenous Peoples and Climate Justice," in Humanities for the Environment: Integrating Knowledge, Forging New Constellations of Practice, ed. Joni Adamson and Michael Davis (New York: Routledge, 2017).
^"Mending and Witnessing: The Practice of Desert Kinship: Naomi Ortiz in Conversation with Julia Watts Belser," Disability and Climate Change Public Archive Project, updated July 1, 2022, 2022, 2025, https://disabilityclimatechange.georgetown.domains/mending-witnessing/.

Read additional faculty reflections upon Swift Hall's centennial: