Inspiring Progress: Religions' Contributions to Sustainable Development

Explores how the world’s religions have a calling to build societies both environmentally sustainable and socially just.

The absence of strong spiritual and ethical dimensions in twentieth-century development helped to produce one of the most violent, environmentally impoverished, and economically unequal centuries in human history. Ethical and spiritual contributions in the twenty-first century are needed to rectify these pitfalls. Religions can help societies to wrestle with the bedrock question of societal advancement: What does it mean to be a developed society? In doing so, religious traditions help to create the new worldviews needed to build sustainable civilizations in the new century. Fortunately, many religious traditions are awakening to their vital role. Inspiring Progress identifies the value that religions add to the debate about societal advancement, and it encourages the world’s religious traditions to step up their involvement in shaping the development path of the human family in the twenty-first century.

Gary Gardner is director of research at the Worldwatch Institute in Washington, DC. His work focuses on a broad array of research and social change issues that affect the effort to build sustainable societies.