Understanding Climate Change as a Biblical Mandate
 
Dr. Stephen Jurovics

Stephen A. Jurovics holds BS and MS degrees from Columbia University and a PhD in Engineering from the University of Southern California. He has had about 20 technical papers published over the years and given numerous presentations at professional conferences. Aspects of climate change mitigation have been the focus of his engineering work for more than two decades.

The existential threat posed by climate change and a belief that the faith community could motivate people to push for mitigating actions led him, out of spiritual curiosity, to research the environmental teachings in the Bible, particularly exploring whether they contained instructions relevant to contemporary issues such as greenhouse gas emissions, preserving biological diversity, recycling, and sustainability. The abundance of applicable teachings and a desire to demonstrate that the faith community has a solid biblical basis for addressing the climate change crisis motivated him to write Hospitable Planet: Faith, Action, and Climate Change (Morehouse Publishing, an imprint of Church Publishing, 2016). The United Methodist Women selected Hospitable Planet for its 2018 reading program and “Education for Ministry,” a program of the Episcopal Church, selected Hospitable Planet as their common reading text in 2021 for their roughly 6,500 participants.