Liz Cooledge Jenkins is a Seattle-based writer and preacher who blogs at lizcooledgejenkins.com and Patheos.

Posts By This Author

Healing Grounds for the Earth — and for Christianity

by Liz Cooledge Jenkins 02-24-2023
If we're serious about fighting climate change by rebuilding soil carbon, we have to address the colonialist systems in which we live.
A group of smiling men and women stand and sit around a wooden table that has several buckets of fruit spread across the top.

From Canticle Farm

WHEN I SPEAK on the phone with Anne Symens-Bucher, she tells me about the end of St. Francis of Assisi’s life. Francis “was losing sight, suffering from the pain of the stigmata, and on the margins of the community that had grown up to follow him,” Symens-Bucher explains. “This is the moment he writes the ‘Canticle of Creation.’” Symens-Bucher is one of the founders of Canticle Farm in Oakland, Calif., a community of eight households where the fences are taken down, giving access to a large garden in the middle. Canticle Farm is made up of people who, in Symens-Bucher’s words, are “experimenting at the intersections of faith-based, social justice-based, and Earth-based nonviolent activism.” In his canticle, after which this community is named, Francis praises God from a deep sense of kinship with all creation. He sings of “brother fire,” “sister water,” “brother wind,” “mother earth.” Birthed as Francis approaches his own death, it is a vivid, sober-minded song of the interconnectedness of all life.

Western colonialist people have often failed — or refused — to recognize this interconnectedness. Earth, animals, plants, and people suffer from our (and I say “our” because I speak as a white U.S. citizen) denial of this oneness. Soils are depleted, waters and air are poisoned, and sea levels rise and temperatures warm, threatening the most vulnerable among us immediately, and all of us eventually. Perhaps in this time of environmental crisis, we might find a “canticle” moment, one that renews our kinship with creation.

Liz Carlisle explores these questions in Healing Grounds: Climate, Justice, and the Deep Roots of Regenerative Farming. As an environmental scientist looking for healthy soil, Carlisle interviews experts who are Black, Indigenous, and people of color — scientists and farmers engaged in work ranging from bringing buffalo back to the prairie ecosystems of Montana to growing mushrooms on ancestral forest land in North Carolina. Through the process, she realizes that if we’re serious about fighting climate change by rebuilding soil carbon, we’re going to have to address the very roots of the colonialist systems in which we live.

Extraordinary Courage, Extraordinary Kindness

by Liz Cooledge Jenkins 04-26-2021

“Boaz goes out of his way, above and beyond what might have been normal or expected, to use his relative wealth, and security, and power to affirm Ruth’s dignity and value. He did this in the midst of a world that, not unlike ours today, did not always value people who were poor, or immigrants, or of a minority race, or ethnicity, or women.”