storm

Ched Myers 4-01-2014

OUR HISTORY IS increasingly hostage to a deep and broad ecological crisis. Stalking us for centuries, it is now upon us in the interlocking catastrophes of climate destruction, habitat degradation, species extinction, and resource exhaustion. Some call it “peak everything.”

“All we have to do to destroy the planet’s climate and biota and leave a ruined world to our children and grandchildren,” concluded environmental policy analyst James Gustave Speth in The Bridge at the Edge of the World, “is to keep doing exactly what we are doing today ... to release greenhouse gases ... impoverish ecosystems and release toxic chemicals at current rates, and the world in the latter part of this century won’t be fit to live in.”

Our Christian faith and practice now unfold either in light of or in spite of this crisis. Our choice is between discipleship and denial.

Two trends among thoughtful Catholics, evangelicals, and other Protestants in North America over the last quarter century are helping awaken us to “response-ability” in the face of these inconvenient truths. One is the spread of contextual theology, which demands both analysis and engagement with social realities around us. The other is how “creation care” has gained broad traction among churches.

But these trends need to be integrated. Contextual approaches have tended to address social, economic, and political issues apart from ecological ones. And environmental theologies are not contextual enough: often too abstract (debating “new cosmologies”), focused on remote symptoms (tropical rain forests or polar ice caps), or merely cosmetic (“greening” congregations through light bulb changes while avoiding controversies such as the Keystone XL pipeline).

Our “all hands on deck” moment requires a practical approach that challenges and equips our churches to learn how to “serve and preserve” the earth (Genesis 2:15). The best way to do that is to focus on the particular places in which we dwell.

Claire Lorentzen 4-29-2011
Royal Pizza. Gamification. Three Words on Art. Here's a little roundup of links from around the Web you may have missed this week:

Leslie G. Woods 8-27-2010

I arrived in the faith-based advocacy community in Washington, D.C. fresh out of divinity school.

Jim Wallis 7-07-2010
Editor's note: Jim Wallis is on a tour of the Gulf Coast with an interfaith group of leaders sponsored by the Sierra Club.
Shane Claiborne 2-26-2010

Something sort of mystical and magical happened after a 19-year-old kid named Papito was killed on our block a few weeks ago. As our neighborhood ached and grieved and cried with his family, we began to create a memorial for Papito where he died

Congress is hard at work on historic energy and climate change legislation. The House of Representatives plans to vote on a bill in the next few weeks, with the Senate to follow in early fall.

Leroy Barber 1-16-2009
This week, for the second time in a few years, I found myself walking the streets of a city talking to pastors and people about how Mission Year could help them recover from a devastating storm.