For some time, I have considered ours to be the golden age of ecological theology and Pope Francis’ 2015 encyclical, Laudato Si’, to be perhaps the best single expression of this golden age. I have also long respected the contributionsRead More →
Note: I’m repositioning these thoughts here both for card-carrying Christians and for some of my readers who don’t identify with the mission of the Christian Church or perhaps not with any particular faith tradition at all. For thoseRead More →
When you were sitting through your last graduation ceremony, your own or a child’s, say, as you were dutifully trying to listen to the commencement speaker, did your mind ever wander? Of course it did. More particularly, did youRead More →
Back in the day, when I served for a score of years as what we used to call an “urban minister,” I and my neighborhood pastoral partners sometimes used to muse: what makes an urban church urban? Best answer atRead More →
I began talking publicly about caring for creation in my first book, Brother Earth (1970). As the ecotheology movement grew in succeeding decades, that construct, which was never just mine by any means, found a place in the then growing discussionsRead More →
This is a question I’ve thought about a lot lately, because I’ve recently been reminded, by my daughter and one of her two daughters, that it’s much on the mind of younger generations these days. While those two key womenRead More →
In recent years, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, its theologians, its pastors, and many of its lay members have been preoccupied with a number of critically important questions, among them these. How are we, as church, to remainRead More →
For me, April 22, 2020 was not just the celebration of the first Earth Day fifty years ago, it also was a more parochial time to begin some ruminating. I published my first book in ecological theology the same yearRead More →
The construct ecological spirituality and terms like that have by now become familiar to many, Christians and others, who are seeking to respond to our global ecojustice crisis from religious perspectives.1 Perhaps the most widely celebrated theological voice in thisRead More →
“A shoot shall come forth from the stump of Jesse…” (Is. 11:1) In front of our old farmhouse in southwestern Maine, I witnessed a sign from heaven this past summer. Several years ago, we called in a tree-man to cutRead More →
Prepared for Lutherans Restoring Creation Commentary (lutheransrestoringcreation.org) Lectionary Series B 2014-2015 September 27, October 4, October 11 A series honoring St. Francis of Assisi Note: Sunday, October 4, 2015 is the Festival of St. Francis. This series affords the preacherRead More →
They asked me what I thought. An academic and church consortium brought me to lovely Adelaide in southern Australia in March of 2015 to present a paper on ecotheology and spirituality. That I did (the paper will be published inRead More →
During my brief visit to Australia in 2015, I had occasion to walk through the Chinese Garden of Friendship in Sydney, a gift in 1988 to that city from the citizens of Guangzhou in southern China. I know very littleRead More →
It must have been Garrison Keillor who observed that at the gates of heaven the Jews will carry a shofar, the Catholics a crucifix, and the Lutherans a bowl of Jello. I saw signs of that Lutheran sensibility on theRead More →
Every late fall, I rake the forest path. It usually takes me a couple of days. I began to carve out that path at the edges of the rugged, wooded hill behind our old farm house in rural, southwestern MaineRead More →