You can now listen to my talk about environmental justice and how it shows up on the landscape, from the Q Conference in Nashville back in April, as it's just been posted as a podcast. The video may be up next week, and I'll update this post with the link. In the talk I referred … Continue reading Mapping environmental injustice…
Religion
What do Haitians think about God and the Earthquake?
I asked Dr. Gerald Murray, an anthropologist and an expert on Haiti, and a Catholic, to write a blog post for Q Ideas about the religious response of people in Haiti to the earthquake a year ago. I know several American Christians who found their faith in the goodness of God rocked by the tragedy … Continue reading What do Haitians think about God and the Earthquake?
Environmental Stewardship and Virtue
Having ignored environmental issues for so long, we may wish we could simply look up some Bible texts, or trust our hearts, to determine what to do--how to steward the earth well. We can't. We wind up aping the ideologies and practices of the left and the right, without much to contribute ourselves, being either uncritically accepting or unreasonably dismissive of claims of environmental crisis. The way to learn a virtuous approach to creation care, is to begin with small, repeated, steps of faithfulness, knowing that we will make mistakes, but concerned more to develop a virtuous character than to "follow rules" or "follow our hearts".
Climate scientists, skeptics earn a “great big time out”
By now you're bound to have heard of the great "Climategate" scandal of late 2009. Hackers broke into the computer archives of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia and stole data and email archives dating back 10 years. Then, somehow (who can say?) these files found their way into the hands of climate uber-skeptics. It was discovered that--shock, horror--climate scientists were saying rude and very unscientific things about their most relentless critics.
All Creatures Great and Small
Animal welfare is a neglected issue for many creation care advocates. A blind spot perhaps, or an area of carefully-maintained ignorance (as it has been for me). It wasn't so for William Wilberforce. The Christian anti-slavery hero was also one of the co-founders of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. He was a clear example of holistic thinking about mercy and justice.
Christopher Wright on Creation Care
In CT this month, Christopher Wright of John Stott Ministries in the U.S., and author of The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible's Grand Narrative, included the "world of creation" among the dimensions of the whole world that biblical mission must address (Whole Gospel, Whole Church, Whole World | The Global Conversation http://bit.ly/4Dnm1G): The world … Continue reading Christopher Wright on Creation Care
Green My Hood
Does caring for the environment always come at the expense of jobs? Is creation care something that must be traded off against people care? My church is tackling that challenge because we care about the beautiful but broken South Atlanta neighborhood we call home.
Fear Not!
A Different Shade of Green(originally published in PRISM magazine, Jan/Feb 08) Fear is a powerful motivator. If you can inspire fear, you can get people to do almost anything. (If you can also inspire loathing, you can get them to do anything.) Evangelicals and environmentalists have a good deal in common. Fear, accompanied by an … Continue reading Fear Not!
“Dominion” means dominion
Journalist G.K. Chesterton once quipped (in Orthodoxy), that original sin was "the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved." Approaching theology, as Karl Barth famously suggested, with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other, certainly finds the hypothesis of total depravity unfalsified. Yet by the end of the … Continue reading “Dominion” means dominion
Tilling and Keeping 