In the breadth of her person, and in the specifics of the projects that she undertook, Jean Sindab wove together the long, proud lineage of struggle for economic, racial, and social justice with the increasingly urgent impulse to protect the natural systems of the planet in response to the escalating environmental crisis. In bringing these two great rivers together, she helped envision and lead a movement for environmental justice in the context of her Christian faith.
Jean was a moral compass in this work. Never again will the nexus of these issues be absent from the ministries of our country's great religious institutions, and, from hereafter, our shared understanding of their meaning will be shaped by who Jean was and what she taught us.
Jean worked to increase the churches' engagement with the environmental crisis because she believed it was a crisis of spirit and a crisis of community. She ensured that these final projects reflected so much of what she cared about. She became the living embodiment of the word "ecology," which literally means "that which binds together."
So often, Jean was that which bound together. She stretched us to deepen our intellectual and political connections between issues while simultaneously deepening the bonds of candor, trust, and vision among those gathered to do the work. Jean was a woman of great compassion, able effortlessly to connect the suffering of our inner cities with the devastation of the rain forest, intuitively knowing the close relationship between the toxic waste poisoning our neighbors and friends and the poisoning of the sky and sea.
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