“We are called to see what love can do: to love our neighbor as ourselves, to aid the widow and orphan, to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, to appeal to consciences and bind the wounds.”
“We are building towards the climax of crisis. The spiritual crisis is folding into the ecological crisis and the ecological crisis is folding into the economic crisis. As Christians, it seems to me, we are now required to critically assess the capital driven market economy and identify it as a false religion, a fabulously productive but ultimately destructive system bringing closure on God’s goodness in creation and bringing a creeping atheism to the soul. To look this system straight in the eye and call it to account is a critical test of Biblical faith.”
“In the sun, the coming together of two hydrogen atoms at intense temperatures and pressures to form an atom of helium results in the release of an energy which is essential to our planet.
This energy has warmed the earth, set the stage for creation, and provided the supporting energy for all life on earth. The dance of the ever-moving atomic particles in the center of the sun could well be described as ‘ascending leaps of unpremeditated joy.'”
“In my studies of the world’s various religions, I have noticed that miracles are important in all of them, miracles meaning events that go beyond any natural explanation and are believed to confirm the power and truth of each tradition.”
“At Blackwater Pond the tossed waters have settled / after a night of rain. / I dip my cupped hands. I drink / a long time. It tastes / like stone, leaves, fire.”
“It would go a great way to caution and direct people in their use of the world, that they were better studied and known in the creation of it.
For how could man find the confidence to abuse it, while they should see the great creator stare them in the face, in all in every part thereof?”
“I thought of myself as a former Peace Corps volunteer who had loved living in a mud hut, and now I had more bathrooms than I could keep clean. I thought of myself as a person who used canvas shopping bags twenty years before it was mainstream, but now with two cars and two electronics-addicted teenagers, I’d developed a low-level despair about my inability to protect the planet they would inherit. I’d been reading about how global warming was withering maize crops in Botswana, the southern African country where I had taught decades earlier – the place that had originally taught me about social responsibility. Our new house was so big, no one heard me when I cried…”
“Once upon a time, all humans knew their lives, their food, their survival, their sense of meaning and kinship with God or the gods was connected with all their relations: the hawks and soil and ferns and mosquitoes. Like all the other wild creatures, they belong to the land, and they knew it. They were untamed and self-willed and listened to their own intrinsic authority. They were part of a grand conversation, a relationship of reciprocity and respect, connecting them with all the other beings and elements of life.”
“I considered that life was sweet in all living creatures, and the taking it away became a very tender point with me. The creatures […] were lent us to be governed in the Great Creator’s fear: and I feel free to refer my readers to his order and allowance in early times, while all the Lord’s works were in harmony, and pronounced by him to be very good…”
“Religions typically give prime importance to a reality greater than the individual self, a reality to which awe and respect, and sometimes even love or fear, is due. Guidance is sought and expected from this greater reality, which may or may not be conceived of as God, and which may encompass all of life, and even all that exists.”
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