Were the Earth and all its resources created just for our benefit? Do plants and animals exist solely for us to consume? Or should we be viewing our role on this planet differently? When it comes to protecting the environment and addressing climate change, religion has had mixed results. Why is that?

With Earth Day almost upon us, we thought it would be the perfect time to take a look at how religion plays into our relationship to the Earth. We’ll talk to psychology professor Jesse Preston about how the way religious people practice their faith may influence their environmental attitudes and behavior. And we’ll speak to the Reverend Dave Bookless about the theological case for Christians to go green and how to make environmental action a spiritual practice.

Jesse Preston is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Warwick. Learn more about her work here.

As the director of theology at A Rocha International, Reverend Dave Bookless is helping to advise and lead many Christian-inspired environmental projects around the globe. Learn more about what he does here.

Our show website is now live! You can check out our full catalog of episodes, read transcripts, and get updates on upcoming live events.

Awe fills us with wonder -- we feel small in the face of things that seem vast, inspiring, almost beyond comprehension. So it makes sense that spiritual experiences often inspire awe. But new science is showing it can also work the other way around.

Awe from any source -- nature's beauty, art and music, even others’ noble acts -- can actually nudge us toward becoming more spiritual -- toward believing in the divine. And along the way, awe offers a host of benefits to support us. From reducing stress, to improving health, to even reducing loneliness, awe soothes our souls, and if we're open to it, pushes us to connect with something greater.

Dacher Keltner is the author of Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How it Can Transform Your Life. Find out more about the book and Dacher’s work here.

To find out more about Piercarlo Valdesolo’s research, visit his website.

Season 4 is coming on Sunday, April 2!

Can learning to experience awe more often be good for us? Does learning to make pottery, sing in a choir, or play a group sport give us some of the same benefits as being part of a religious community? Does being Christian make you more or less likely to taking a stand on climate change? What does Buddhism have to teach us about healing the divisions in this country? And do spiritual traditions hold any answers for addressing the massive mental health crisis among teens and young adults today?

Join us this season to find out.

While we’re working on Season 4, we wanted to share a special episode from another podcast we love, The Happiness Lab.

On The Happiness Lab, Dr. Laurie Santos explores all the ways we get our happiness wrong and what we can do to really feel better. She walks through the latest evidence-based strategies for improving your mental health, sharing practical advice on what will really bring more joy.

In this episode, Laurie looks at what a centuries-old Sanskrit text, The Yoga Sutras, can teach us about improving both the body and mind. The author, Patanjali, makes clear that the poses and stretches are only part of the picture - we also need to be kind, contemplative and grounded. Jessamyn Stanley (yoga teacher and author of Yoke: My Yoga of Self-Acceptance) takes Laurie through Patanjali's text, saying its lessons "can be applied in every circumstance, no matter who you are or where you are."

Hear more from The Happiness Lab at apple.co/happinesslab.

What do we owe future humans? In principle, it seems obvious that we should do what we can to make life better for the generations that follow, just as our ancestors did for us. But while most of us agree that doing this is the right thing, it can be hard to put into practice while also avoiding some of the pitfalls that often afflict growing philosophies like effective altruism and longtermism.

Join Dave as he speaks to Harvard psychologist and philosopher Joshua Greene about what drives our moral instincts, and to futurist Ari Wallach about how tapping into spirituality and emotion can help us become better ancestors to those yet to be born.

Find out more about Joshua Greene’s work, including how to buy his book Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them, on his greene.net/">website. Also, check out Giving Multiplier, a donation system Josh co-created based on research about how to improve charitable giving decisions.

Ari Wallach is the author of Longpath: Becoming the Great Ancestors Our Future Needs. Find out about the book and Longpath in general here. You can also read Ari’s article for Wired about addressing short-termism, or watch his TED talk.

Other interesting readings on the topic for this episode: holiday-gift-givewell.html">The Big Thing Effective Altruism (Still) Gets Right, by Ezra Klein for the New York Times, and Effective altruism gave rise to Sam Bankman-Fried. Now it’s facing a moral reckoning, by Sigal Samuel for Vox.

Sooner or later, most of us experience grief from losing someone we love. It’s always painful, and sometimes even debilitating. But there is plenty we can do to help ourselves and others be resilient. Join Dave as he talks with Columbia University psychologist George Bonanno and Rabbi Angela Buchdahl about ways to promote a healthy mourning process and find a path back to life.

George Bonnano’s book The Other Side of Sadness: What the New Science of Bereavement Tells Us About Life After Loss, is available on his website. Find out more about Rabbi Angela Buchdahl here.

If you ask people what they think about religion, you often get one of two answers: Religion is the source of war, violence, abuse, and hypocrisy OR a route to love, kindness, tolerance, and mercy. Put another way, it’s either what divides us or it’s the thing that can actually bring us together. In a country deeply divided over social, political, and moral issues that seems to be moving further apart by the day, the answer’s not likely to be a simple one.

How God Works held its first live event in December to explore just that. Why does something that has the potential to connect us so deeply also have the ability to divide us so profoundly? And, regardless of what we believe, is there something we can learn from what religion gets right to find a way to come together?

In a wide-ranging and often moving discussion, Dave spoke to a panel of leading spiritual thinkers and social scientists who have experienced both sides of the issue, including Central Synagogue Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, award-winning author and Christian Historian Diana Butler Bass, The University of North Carolina’s Deepest Beliefs Lab director Kurt Gray, and The Aspen Institute’s Religion and Society Program’s executive director Simran Jeet Singh.

This podcast episode is an audio recording of the event in its entirety. If you’d rather watch than listen, a video of the event is available here.

Time with family, friends and loved ones is supposed to be at the center of the holiday season… but in our screen-dominated world, how many of us can say that’s still true? Our devices are purposefully designed to monopolize our attention and make themselves hard to put down. So even though we know that spending too much time staring at screens is bad for us, the addiction can be hard to break.

With the New Year almost upon us, why not try to make a new start? Join Dave as he tries to put down his phone and find a little spiritual renewal with advice from marketing professor Adam Alter and Tech Shabbat advocate Rabbi Sydney Mintz.

Adam Alter is the author of Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked. To find out more about Adam’s work, including his forthcoming book, Anatomy of a Breakthrough, visit his website.

In addition to serving as the Rabbi of Temple Emanu-El in San Francisco for 25 years, Sydney Mintz is also an activist, writer, and performer. Find out more about the many projects she’s involved in on her website.

Find out more about the ideas behind Tech Shabbat in Tiffany Shlain’s book 24/6: Giving Up Screens One Day a Week to Get More Time, Creativity, and Connection. To learn more about the spiritual aspects of Shabbat, Rabbi Mintz recommends reading The Sabbath, by Abraham Joshua Heschel.

‘Tis the season for giving and…forgiving. But while forgiveness is something to which we often aspire, it can be harder than it seems at times. It's human to feel the tension between the urge for revenge and the intent to forgive, especially when the hurt or betrayal is great. That tension shows up in many religions too, though forgiveness usually wins. But it’s not just a religious ideal, it’s also a biological necessity.

We’ll talk to evolutionary psychologist Michael McCullough about the evolutionary case for forgiveness and why it’s a show of strength, not weakness. And theologian Miroslav Volf about the Christian foundation for forgiveness, and the tools religion can offer when forgiveness feels impossible.

Michael McCullough is a Professor of Psychology at UC San Diego. He is author of the book Beyond Revenge: The Evolution of the Forgiveness Instinct. Find out more about his work on his mccullough.com/">website.

Professor Miroslav Volf is founder and director of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. Read his book, Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace, and listen to the Center’s podcast For the Life of the World.

Join us for the very first How God Works live event this Wednesday, December 7th at 7:30pm, at The Greene Space in New York.

For tickets and more information, click here.

If you can’t make it in person, not to worry, we’ll be livestreaming the event here.