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Reviews of new books about Faith and the Environment
April 17 2009:
Soon coming: reviews of:
* Go Green, $ave Green by Nancy Sleeth, about how the author and her family reduced their all-American fuel bill to $13, and learned to love and protect Creation at the same time.
* A Greener Faith by Roger Gottlieb.
* Small Footprint, Big Handprint: Rediscovering the church’s responsibility to environmental stewardship by Tri Robinson and Jason Chatraw.
* Green Spirituality, one answer to global environmental
problems and world poverty by Chris Philpott
MARCH 2009Holy Ground: A Gathering of Voices on Caring for Creation. Edited by Lyndsay Moseley, Sierra Club Books.
Love God, Heal Earth: 21 Leading Religious Voices Speak Out on Our Sacred Duty to Protect the Environment. The Rev. Canon Sally G Bingham, St Lynn's Press.
There we were, at ARC Head Office, thinking that it would be a wonderful idea to compile a book full of stories from some of the faith leaders who have been working with the environment for many years… and now two have come along at once – the Sierra Club’s Holy Ground: A Gathering of Voices on Caring for Creation, and Interfaith Power and Light’s Love God, Heal Earth: 21 Leading Religious Voices Speak Out on Our Sacred Duty to Protect the Environment.
One of ARC's favourite quotations about the “religions approach” to the environment is from Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, which is America’s oldest and largest grassroots environmental organisation with around 1.3 million members. “I was part of the generation that made the choice – the horrendous strategic blunder – of situating ourselves outside the institutions of faith," he told the Christian Science Monitor in 2007. But how they have been making up for it since.
First came the impressive Faith in Action last year with an example from every US State, including the Community Lutheran Church of Sterling in Virginia, which operates a community garden and provides organic produce to local low-income families, or the Islamic Environmental Group of Wisconsin, or the Catholic Bishops of the Dioceses of Pueblo and Colorado Springs in Colorado, who spoke out against the heavy pollution of a major creek nearby, when it was inundated by sewage spills. Their participation helped bring in government officials from all levels, to see the creek for themselves.
This year they have published Holy Ground, edited by Lyndsay Moseley, which includes articles by the Patriarch Bartholomew, the Pope, Wendell Berry, as well as many of the active US-based faith conservationists. Islamic scholar Seyyed Hossein Nast of George Washington University writes about how this current crisis can be seen as the outer manifestation of the barrenness in our inner lives. Essayist David James Duncan writes a terrific piece called "Song of Salmon", about his own journeys to learn and explore how – in very many ways - salmon are holy.
“Salmon are holy,” I replied, “because on the Bible’s very first page God says “Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life… And God created great whales and fishes and every living creature that moveth…And blessed them, saying Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas.” Does that sound like a description of an industrial pond full of tilapia or a brown tide of net-penned salmon sewage?"
Allan Johnson’s account of how Christian groups took action to protect Virginia’s landscape from mountaintop removal - a deeply devastating surgical activity by mining companies to find coal cheaply is also deeply moving.
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| Islamic scholar Seyyed Hossein Nast of George Washington University writes about how this current crisis can be seen as the outer manifestation of the barrenness in our inner lives. |
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Several of the contributors also appear in Sally Bingham’s book Love God, Heal Earth. She writes personally about her own powerful story, setting up Interfaith Power and Light and the Regeneration Project, understanding how important it is for Christians to see how they need to love God’s Creation if they are going to love God. The book also contains voices from Buddhism, Reform Judaism, Catholicism, Islam, Unitarian-Universalists, Evangelical Christians and others.
"What a perfect spring day!"writes the Rev Charles Morris of St Elizabeth Catholic Church in Wyandote Michigan. "Sunday, June 10, 2001 is auspicious not just because of the bright blue sky and the 70 degree temperature... For this day, we are dedicating the installation of solar panels and a wind turbine... As I wend my way over to the wind turbine I take note that although it has been a beautiful day, the day has also been still - no wind. But at the exact instant the holy water touches the wind turbine, a gust of wind suddenly appears, the turbine spins and the assembled guests begin to gasp. I look up to heaven and give a thumbs up sign. In the telling of it] that story serves as marker or a new ruah, the Hebrew word for breath of the spirit. When the Divine Spirit blows over the waters of chaos in the opening account of Genesis, the process of creation begins..."
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Updated July 1, 2009 :
Major Faiths Invited to Celebrate 7 Year Plans at Windsor Castle
The first Plans for Generational Change will be launched by faiths at Windsor Castle in
November - just before the Copenhagen climate change negotiations. |
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ARC at a glance
ARC is a secular body that helps the major religions of the world to develop their own environmental programmes, based on their own core teachings, beliefs and practices. |
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