Creation Care
My two boys have an alley for a backyard. Luke (9) and Jack (5) are thoroughly urban kids, but I watched them, these past two weeks, fall in love with a natural world far different from their own in a magical place called Block Island, off the coast of Rhode Island.
I came here a lot as a younger man. It was the home of lawyer-theologian William Stringfellow, one of my theological and political mentors, and it still has a little cottage on the back of the property that is used by [...]
A friend of mine recalls a dinner-table conversation one day when she was a schoolgirl. Her dad had come home unusually frustrated from his job as a city planner. "D#@*$% environmentalists!" he said over dinner. "Dad, I thought you were an environmentalist," she said. "Why are you so upset?"
"All day long," he answered, "environmentalists come to me with problems and complaints, and business people come to me with ideas and projects. Why can't the environmentalists be proactive [...]
As a convert to Orthodox Christianity, I have come to appreciate the strong connection in our tradition between spirituality and creation. Many of our great feasts, minor celebrations, and daily prayers involve joining prayer, blessing, and the material world. Unlike Western Christians who remember the three kings on Jan. 6, 13 days after Christmas we celebrate Theophany, the feast of the baptism of Christ in the Jordan. Part of this feast includes blessing water in our churches or [...]
In January, I was nominated to be one of the Torchbearers for the Olympic Torch Relay when it came to
Recently, both President Bush and an oil company spokesperson, speaking to the rising gas prices, pushed for building more refineries and upping the production of oil here in the States. No mention of exorbitant oil company profits. No mention of our need to drastically reduce use of cars and gasoline, to change lifestyles. No mention of the working poor who are stuck without public transportation to jobs remote from their inner-city or inner-ring suburban homes.
Reducing dependence [...]
Environmental consciousness seems to be gaining momentum with increasing numbers of "eco-friendly" products out there from organic bath towels to hybrid cars. But are we really being more environmentally conscious when we buy these products? Are we actually thinking twice about the ecological consequences, or are we just switching from "brand x" to "brand organic"? A recent Washington Post article,
As the nation's second largest denomination (after the Roman Catholic Church), Southern Baptists have been given much, so their potential to do good is considerable - as is the danger of missing opportunities to do good. Sadly, until now, constituents and leaders of the 16-million-member Convention have tended to lag behind other large Christian communities when it comes to addressing the issue of environmental stewardship in general and climate change in particular. But that may be [...]
At last week's New Baptist Unity Conference in Atlanta, an estimated 20,000 Baptists spanning the moderate to progressive spectrum gathered for three days of worship, fellowship, and training. Even though Southern Baptists were conspicuously missing, the conference united members of denominations from the American Baptist Convention, Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, National Baptist Convention USA, and the Progressive National Baptist Convention, among others, to collectively represent over [...]
The Archbishop of Canterbury posted his New Year's message on YouTube - inviting everyone making a resolution in 2008 to keep asking, "What world do we want to pass on to the next generation?" Filmed between a recycling center and the Canterbury Cathedral, Archbishop Rowan Williams said:
In a society where we think of so many things as disposable, where we expect to be constantly discarding last year's gadget and [...]
The watered-down energy bill passed by the Senate on Thursday raised fuel-economy standards by 40 percent-not a bad thing. Congress also boosted the production of biofuels to 36 billion gallons per year by 2022-and 21 billion must come from something other than corn-based ethanol, which is good since it takes more fossil fuel to make corn ethanol than corn ethanol saves. According to
"We have the ability to solve this crisis and avoid the worst of its consequences, if we act boldly, decisively and quickly", said Al Gore in is Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech. He called on the U.S. and China, the worst polluters, to stop blaming others and take action "or stand accountable before history for their failure to act." God calls us to care for creation and the generations to come; we, too, will stand judged if we do not rouse from our doze and not only call for action on [...]
The new 2007-2008 UN Human Development report is focused on "Fighting climate change: Human solidarity in a divided world." According to news stories, the report clearly links overcoming climate change with [...]
At its board meeting last month, the National Association of Evangelicals formally named Leith Anderson as its president. Anderson is senior pastor of Wooddale Church in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, and has been serving as interim president of the NAE for the past year.
I've had the opportunity to spend some time with Leith Anderson. I believe he is the kind of leader most needed these days, [...]
Perhaps I am dumb, but I had never connected flicking a switch to turn on the lights with increased asthma in children, higher levels of mercury in the Chesapeake Bay (and the need to stay away from eating too much fish), mountain top removal in West Virginia, and global warming. Over the past [...]
According to the World Wildlife Fund, each of us needs about 2.5 acres of arable land to be sustained with needed food. Then we need to add another two acres or so - enough land to sustain the plants [...]
Here's the word from the physical world: On Sept. 10, scientists studying satellite images of the Arctic reported that sea ice covered 4.32 million square kilometers of the north. The old record, set two years before: 5.34 million square kilometers. Mark Serreze, an Arctic specialist at the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Centre at Colorado University in Denver, said, "It's amazing. It's simply [...]
In an encouraging shift away from the status quo, many Christian groups are taking a more focused look at stewarding God's creation. A few notable references to biblical environmentalism have been popping up in the news lately. On the recently aired CNN series "God's Warriors," Richard Cizik explains
Highly suspicious. That's what I was.
I was invited to a meeting whose participants were considering proposing something along the line of "Green Gospels." After all, I am an evangelical, and being involved in anything that has to do with treating the scriptures with a particular perspective carries with it the danger of perverting the original intent.
I took my day off yesterday and completed an annual pilgrimage of mine, a pilgrimage that began when I was a boy. I used to walk hand-in-hand with my dad to a pond near our home in upstate New York, and my dad would scoop out a mass of frog eggs with a big plastic bucket. Surrounded by the trills and calls [...]
I am sitting in a hotel in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and I just read Jim Wallis' recent post about global warming, responding to the [...]