Climate Change Anxiety: One Need New BU Chaplain Hopes to Tackle
For Jonathan Lee, religious faith and passion for the environment go hand in hand
Jonathan Lee, who is assuming a new chaplain position at Marsh Chapel designed to better engage students, empathizes with Terriers who want to infuse their studies with their faith.
Marsh Chapel Appoints Inaugural Associate Chaplain for Student Outreach
For Jonathan Lee, religious faith and passion for the environment go hand in hand
Any BU students wrestling with religious faith—or seeking purpose generally–might relate to Jonathan Lee. As Marsh Chapel’s associate chaplain for student outreach, a newly created position, Lee hopes to relate to them, having struggled to infuse his own faith with real-world purpose.
Growing up in North Carolina, Lee “hopped around different denominations,” including evangelical Christianity, which left him guilt-ridden “when I wasn’t kind of meeting the expectations for what a good Christian ought to be doing.” Then he spent a life-changing high school fall in an exchange program with a school on the Maine coast, where his faith intersected with his study of, and awe for, the surrounding glories of nature.
“I remember I was in the woods, off by myself,” he says. “They had us do solo reflection moments. It all just suddenly clicked for me. Something as simple as the creation story in Genesis 1 and 2. I was in the woods and I was like, oh, this is it! … This is what God created. … I was sketching some leaves, and I was like, God, the creator of the universe, created this leaf. And then God created me.”
Faith-based concern about climate change’s damage to creation will be part of his outreach roadmap to Terriers, though the specifics after just a month on the job remain to be decided, Lee says. Whatever he does, says the Rev. Karen Coleman, BU’s Episcopal chaplain and one of his supervisors, Marsh is delighted to welcome Lee.
“It’s not that [outreach] hasn’t been done before,” she says, but rather that
“we’re recognizing that more can be done.” Previously, she managed the Chapel’s outreach with the Rev. Jessica Chicka, Marsh’s chaplain for international students and Lee’s other supervisor, but “there were more opportunities for community engagement than Jess and I could possibly get to.” With Lee, ”Our portfolio expanded in terms of student outreach.”
We talked to Lee, who is preparing for ordination to become a Presbyterian minister, about his new job.
Q&A
with Jonathan Lee
BU Today: What would you like students to know about you?
Lee: I’m a pretty avid gardener. I went to Davidson College in North Carolina, and I was a student employee on the campus farm there, helping plant and harvest and also run markets. At Yale Divinity School, [where he did graduate study] we had a community garden, and I helped run that as well. Growing up, my grandparents owned a few acres in North Carolina, so they would grow a lot of their own food.
[But] I wasn’t particularly interested until [the] program up in Maine. That’s tied to how I became an environmental studies major in college, and how [I made] faith more personal. The program was all about camping and canoe trips and working outside; I grew up playing video games, reading comic books, things that I still love to do today. I was also getting exposed to conversations about climate change and sustainability. I was saying to myself, this is a really important field, I want to do my part to keep the climate healthy, because I’ve met God in nature, and I want to help someone else meet God in nature, even if it’s just one other person.
BU Today: Why are you at Marsh Chapel instead of the environmental studies program?
Lee: During my senior year of college, we had a thesis. I was reflecting on why I was an environmental studies major and what made me go into that field in the first place. I was thinking about my faith and how important that was. And I wanted to marry the two in a tangible fashion.
People told me to recycle since I was in utero, basically. I’ve learned about composting, saving water, yada yada yada. But I never heard it in church. What is the church saying about these things? If we believe the church is supposed to be this moral guide, why is the church not leading us on these environmental issues, when the impact is incredibly moral, touching individuals and the planet. I started looking to environmental theology [at Yale Divinity].
People told me to recycle since I was in utero, basically. I’ve learned about composting, saving water, yada yada yada. But I never heard it in church.
BU Today: You’ll be drafting the contours of your new job in the coming months. What do you hope to be doing that Marsh hasn’t been doing up till now?
Marsh is doing a lot. [But] when there are 30,000 grad and undergrad students, it’s going to be hard to get to that many, as well as faculty and staff. One of the areas of growth for Marsh has been engagement with the various student ministries, like Reformed University Fellowship [a scripture-based Christian group], CRU [the US arm of Campus Crusade for Christ]–there are more than a dozen, and not just Christian. We want Marsh to have a more intentional relationship with these groups, other than just, every year, saying, “Sign our form [to be] officially affiliated with religious life on campus.”
One of Marsh Chapel’s goals and a goal of mine is to build out those relationships. An idea that I would be interested to see come to fruition is an event that addresses climate grief and students’ emotional wellbeing related to climate change. That’s something I’ve wrestled with. What does it mean to carry a message of hope and renewal when we’re constantly getting these messages that the earth is burning?
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