Christianity and Ecology

I have watched, even in my own short lifetime, how Christian theology has recovered a sense of the ecological and its importance. In 1991 at the World Council of Churches assembly in Canberra, the theme of "justice, peace, and the integrity of creation" was already everywhere in discussion, and that has only continued over the last thirty years, with each of the last three popes contributing to a 'thicker' eco-theology if one may use that not entirely satisfactory phrase. Other thinkers have also played large parts here.

On the Orthodox side, the Ecumenical Patriarch has long been dubbed the "green patriarch" for his advocacy of a fully recovered Christian stewardship of "this fragile earth, our island home," to borrow a Canadian Anglican euchological phrase. Orthodox theologians have made signal contributions to this discussion. 

And now we have a new book that gathers together much of the best of Christian scholarship: The Oxford Handbook of the Bible and Ecology, eds. Hilary Marlow and Mark Harris (Oxford UP, 2022), 496pp. About this collection the publisher tells us this:

Environmental issues are an ever-increasing focus of public discourse and have proved concerning to religious groups as well as society more widely. Among biblical scholars, criticism of the Judeo-Christian tradition for its part in the worsening crisis has led to a small but growing field of study on ecology and the Bible. This volume in the Oxford Handbook series makes a significant contribution to this burgeoning interest in ecological hermeneutics, incorporating the best of international scholarship on ecology and the Bible. The Handbook comprises 30 individual essays on a wide range of relevant topics by established and emerging scholars. Arranged in four sections, the volume begins with a historical overview before tackling some key methodological issues. The second, substantial, section comprises thirteen essays offering detailed exegesis from an ecological perspective of selected biblical books. This is followed by a section exploring broader thematic topics such as the Imago Dei and stewardship. Finally, the volume concludes with a number of essays on contemporary perspectives and applications, including political and ethical considerations.

The editors Hilary Marlow and Mark Harris have drawn on their experience in Hebrew Bible and New Testament respectively to bring together a diverse and engaging collection of essays on a subject of immense relevance. Its accessible style, comprehensive scope, and range of material means that the volume is a valuable resource, not only to students and scholars of the Bible but also to religious leaders and practitioners.

To Be a Priest of Creation

Neither John Chryssavgis nor John Zizioulas need any special introduction to those with any passing familiarity with contemporary Orthodox thought, especially its "green" turn. But the former has nonetheless edited a new book about the latter's recent sacerdotal-ecological writings: Priests of Creation: John Zizioulas on Discerning an Ecological Ethos (T&T Clark, July 2021), 248pp.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

Based on a constructive reading of Scripture, the apostolic and patristic traditions and deeply rooted in the sacramental experience and spiritual ethos of the Orthodox Church, John Zizioulas offers a timely anthropological and cosmological perspective of human beings as “priests of creation” in addressing the current ecological crisis.

Given the critical and urgent character of the global crisis and by adopting a clear line of argumentation, Zizioulas describes a vision based on a compassionate and incarnational conception of the human beings as liturgical beings, offering creation to God for the life of the world. He encourages the need for deeper interaction with modern science, from which theology stands to gain an appreciation of the interconnection of every aspect of materiality and life with humankind. The result is an articulate and promising vision that inspires a new ethos, or way of life, to overcome our alienation from the rest of creation.

Climate Change and Christianity

Phillip Jenkins is a scholar to whom one should always pay attention. His range is wide. To cite just one example, his book on the Great War as a "holy war" is revealing and disturbing, especially (one hopes) for all the Fatima fetishists.

He has a new book out: Climate, Catastrophe, and Faith: How Changes in Climate Drive Religious Upheaval (Oxford UP, 2021), 272pp. 

About this new book the publisher tells us this:

One of the world's leading scholars of religious trends shows how climate change has driven dramatic religious upheavals.

Long before the current era of man-made climate change, the world has suffered repeated, severe climate-driven shocks. These shocks have resulted in famine, disease, violence, social upheaval, and mass migration. But these shocks were also religious events. Dramatic shifts in climate have often been understood in religious terms by the people who experienced them. They were described in the language of apocalypse, millennium, and Judgment. Often, too, the eras in which these shocks occurred have been marked by far-reaching changes in the nature of religion and spirituality. Those changes have varied widely--from growing religious fervor and commitment; to the stirring of mystical and apocalyptic expectations; to waves of religious scapegoating and persecution; or the spawning of new religious movements and revivals. In many cases, such responses have had lasting impacts, fundamentally reshaping particular religious traditions.

In Climate, Catastrophe, and Faith historian Philip Jenkins draws out the complex relationship between religion and climate change. He asserts that the religious movements and ideas that emerge from climate shocks often last for many decades, and even become a familiar part of the religious landscape, even though their origins in particular moments of crisis may be increasingly consigned to remote memory. By stirring conflicts and provoking persecutions that defined themselves in religious terms, changes in climate have redrawn the world's religious maps, and created the global concentrations of believers as we know them today.

This bold new argument will change the way we think about the history of religion, regardless of tradition. And it will demonstrate how our growing climate crisis will likely have a comparable religious impact across the Global South.

Michael Martin on Transfiguration

Running interviews on this blog is one of its real delights, and never more so than with authors of such fascinating and wide-ranging erudition as Michael Martin, whom I previously interviewed here about his earlier book on sophiology. This also allows me to repay, in part, the kindnesses he bestowed on me in helping get my own recent book into print and then blurbing it so generously.

As usual in these interviews, I e-mailed some questions to Michael. Here are his thoughts.

AD: Tell us about your background.

I started out as a musician and songwriter, long, long ago, before I eventually wandered into Waldorf teaching. Around the same time as I started teaching, I became involved with the Biodynamic Farming and Gardening movement and also did some garden design and consulting in that regard. After sixteen years of Waldorf teaching, I left to become a professor of English, philosophy, and religious studies at Marygrove College in Detroit. When the College—shockingly—announced it was eliminating its undergraduate program in 2017, I found myself at a crossroads. Since then, I’ve concentrated on farming and alternative education. My wife and I run a CSA and market garden (Stella Matutina Farm) and also raise dairy goats, poultry, hogs, and tend an apiary. I also started The Center for Sophiological Studies in 2018, where I offer online courses, education, and occasional lectures.

AD: What led to the writing of Transfiguration: Notes toward a Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything?

MM: In summer of 2016 I hosted a conference at our farm on the theme of “The Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything.” We had sessions on all the themes represented in the book as well as thoughts on conviviality, liturgy, and ecumenism. In fact, my journal, Jesus the Imagination, was conceived that weekend. So I guess we could say that the seed for the book was planted then as well.

In 2017 I taught a course called “Science and Religion: At the Crossroads” and started thinking seriously about what “science” could possibly mean in a religious context. As a scholar of 16th and 17th century religious literature, I am acutely aware that what we now think of as “science” did not exist then and that understandings of phusis or natura were not exactly separate from the concerns of metaphysics, ontology, or theology. What we now call science and mysticism, for instance, were often indistinguishable from one another, as, for example, in alchemy, astrology, and magic.

John Milbank and Adrian Pabst have spoken of the “alternative modernity” that has continued since the Scientific Revolution—a modernity characterized by sympathies for hermeticism, mysticism, and, maybe not so obviously, Sophiology. I wondered what would have happened if science and religion had not been divorced at that time (and who did the kids end up living with?). What would science look like now if the realm of the spirit had not been excluded from consideration, let alone investigation? So that got me started. Eventually I expanded it to other areas of concern: education, the arts, economics, technology.

AD: People often gloss over sub-titles but I’m quite struck by what seems a real tension in yours between: notes, radical, and everything. The latter two suggest a kind of totalized, comprehensive, far-reaching, and inescapable revolution, while the first suggests provisionality, hesitation, incompleteness, a work-in-progress. Explain for us if you would a little bit about that tension (which seems to me both healthy and necessary).

“Provisionality” is exactly what I was going for: the book was meant to be an initiation to conversation and thoughtful consideration. But I am also seriously and adamantly interested in a radical re-imagination of everything. I think we are at the mercy of old forms and obligations in the Church which need to be re-imagined, or thrown out, or otherwise transfigured. If not, I think the game’s over—and by “the Church” I have a much broader understanding than meaning “Rome” or “Constantinople,” just as the “Catholic” of the title is meant to include a broader field than individual confessions. Indeed, after the disaster of last summer (which impelled you to write your important Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed) I very nearly took “Catholic” out of the subtitle. However, I felt an obligation to the impulse that started at the conference and the tiny movement that arose from it, and decided to let it stay, though not without misgivings.

AD: I have to say that your introduction really resonated with me in this being a book you did not want to write but did so out of a sense of vocation to the future, which is something I felt and feel about my own recent book. What did you mean by that?

MM: I felt a distinct call to write this book, even though I had planned on working on a volume of poetry. It was like a spiritual tap on the shoulder: you need to do this. I was not unaware of the boldness—that some might take as outrageousness—of some of my proposals. But I was also tentative.

I wrote the first chapter in 2016, but waited almost year before beginning the rest. My friend, the composer, musician, and clinician Therese Schroeder-Sheker encouraged me along the way. She reminded that me that only I could write this book, no one else: my particular biography had prepared me for it and that it was important that I should get it out there. It was my task; I was called to it. I sent several drafts to Therese and another friend as well as to my publisher with the instruction that they should tell me whether or not I’d lost my mind. They encouraged me to not hold back. So I didn’t. John Riess, publisher at Angelico, said, “It sounds like most of the things you write. What’s the problem?” Ha! I suppose I could have played it safe, like a good academic, but I didn’t want to face the Master after my death without having performed my task. That’s how strong this sense of vocation was. It’s like your book: I don’t see how anyone else could have written it. You were called to it; your biography prepared you for it.

AD: I’m very glad to hear you speak of the desperation on the part of some Catholics who bring out Mendel or Roger Bacon as examples of “Catholic scientists,” a move that you suggest leaves nothing changed by merely juxtaposing two disciplines or commitments. Instead of that, yours is a more far-reaching call—here is the ‘radical’ of your sub-title coming in, it seems to me—for a Catholic science, as you call it. That phrase, as you know, on the part of clumsy apologists and opponents alike can be easily abused (“does 2+2 = 5 if the pope says so?”), so why don’t you unpack it for us a little bit.

Well, first of all, I think it’s okay to admit that the tendency for some Catholics to point to various scientists (those you mention, as well as Lemaître...even Descartes!) is not much more than a desperate plea for cultural legitimacy. It’s embarrassing. As you can see in the book, I think Goethe’s “delicate empiricism” offers something much more hospitable to a Catholic/Christian sensibility than the exploitive, even rapacious arm of the corporatacracy that science as we know it has too often become.

There are other scientists out there—David Bohm, Brian Josephson, Rupert Sheldrake, to name just three—who offer something more holistically sympathetic to a Catholic/Christian and, indeed, sophianic worldview than that parade of “scientific saints” typically wheeled out by the Catholic mainstream; but since these figures were or are not dues-paying members of team Rome they get ignored while the scientific materialism and spiritual emptiness of the scientific saints is celebrated just because somebody went to or celebrated Mass in between materialist conquests. I don’t doubt the faith of the canonized scientists. It’s their science I have a problem with.

Also, to reiterate, when I use the term “Catholic,” what I really mean is “sacramental.” So this attributive can also be applied to Anglicanism and Eastern Orthodoxy. As a Byzantine Catholic who grew up in the Latin church but is a scholar of the Metaphysical Poets—most of them Anglican clergymen— my spiritual psyche is pretty much all over the place. And the older I get, the more the alleged divisions between these different confessions just look stupid and petty: a reading of Christian history first as tragedy, then as farce.

AD: Reverence for life, understood much more comprehensively than any of us in the sciences or humanities alike (“we murder to dissect”!), is a key theme of your first chapter, but almost everywhere strangled by our tendencies for abstraction, materialism, and problems in operative cosmologies. Tell us a bit more about this, and how you see sophiology playing its part here.

I recently caught a video on social media of a woman, ostensibly a housewife, being interviewed while on LSD. This was in the 1950s when scientists routinely explored these kinds of phenomena. When the non-participant researcher asks her what she is experiencing, she says things like “Can’t you see it? I’m part of it…We’re all part of it... Everything is one...I’ve never seen such infinite beauty in my life.”

Sophiology does the same thing, but with none of the harmful side-effects. Something one notices when reading through the history of Sophiology is that all of the great sophiologists—Boehme, the Philadelphians, Solovyov, Florensky, Bulgakov, Merton, and Tomberg to name only a handful—came to a similar holistic insight, sometimes through liturgy or prayer, sometimes through the arts, sometimes through nature; but always through contemplation. (I don’t think it’s any accident that most of them held to apokatastasis, either.) It all goes back to Proverbs 8: “When he prepared the heavens, I was there: when he set a compass upon the face of the depth.” Proverbs 8 is my touchstone, the place to which I return, again and again, to remind myself what reality is. It cuts through ideology, confessionalism, tribalism. I think this is where Sophiology meets phenomenology: it engages the epoché and is present to what is.

And “what is” is Sophia, the Glory of the Lord, the Presence, shining through Creation (to my mind, Terrence Malick’s films are essentially an extended meditation on this insight). And once you see it: that’s it. There’s no turning back. Such an experience requires, indeed, impels one to a holistic, ecumenical sensibility. Actually, the original subtitle for The Submerged Reality was “Ecology, Ecumenism, Orthodoxy.”

“Reverence for life,” unfortunately, has become something of a hackneyed and politically-charged phrase. Before one announces reverence for something, it’s a good idea to actually know what it is. But once one sees this shining, reverence is the only response. Goethe’s science, in fact, adopts reverence as a methodology. He called the science of Bacon and Newton “the empirico-mechanico-dogmatic torture chamber” for a reason.

AD: Your claim at the end of your first chapter, “We don’t need a new revelation; we need to do something with the revelation we already have” (33) seems to me linked to another bold claim at the start of your second: “Christians are afraid of the death of Christianity. This is irony at its most sublime” (35). Two thoughts: is this fear a universal problem, or perhaps more acute in the US, especially among certain evangelicals and Catholics? Second, is this fear of the death of Christianity (and perhaps more accurately the social power of its proponents) what lies behind the mania for new “revelation,” new programs (“evangelization”) and new “options” (pseudo-Benedictine and otherwise)?

Maybe it would have been better for me to have written “The Christianity that we are so desperately trying to hold onto is already dead.” I think that’s what we see all over the place—especially in America, Europe, Australia (and I am not a fan of the “the Church is strong in Africa/South America, etc.” chorus; what I see coming from those spheres seems pretty rigid)—but it is not something anyone wants to admit.

Some Traditionalists seem to think that if everybody just went back to the Tridentine Mass all of our problems would go away and there would arise a new Holy Roman Emperor or something. Dream on! Is this not a kind of infantilism? On the other hand, I share their eye-rolling at what often transpires in the typical Novus Ordo Mass, which more and more strikes me as a kind of Infomercial for Jesus.

I do think the fear is connected to a fear of losing power. But no one wants to own up to that! As you can tell from the book, I think the “bunkerism” of much of what passes for Christian culture (especially, but not exclusively, in conservative circles) is pretty desperate, and often pathetic. Let’s call it “The New Martyrdom.” That is the polar opposite of the Sophiological, which is characterized by porousness, an openness to grace, and idealism (not in a philosophical sense) and not by fear and what appears to be a death wish.

Did you ever look around during a Mass or Divine Liturgy and wonder why nobody looks happy? I mean really happy. I’ve been obsessing too much about this lately, perhaps—but would people look that maudlin if Christ were really there? (I mean, He is, but nobody acts like it). In Denys Arcand’s film Jesus of Montreal there’s a great scene in which the actress playing Mary Magdalen in a reworked Passion Play comes running at full speed down a cavernous hallway, her eyes on fire and with a tremendous smile on her face. She sees the disciples and announces, “I’ve seen Him! He’s alive!” Should we not be doing the same thing?

AD: You tell us in your second chapter, “Art as Eschatology,” that any Christian art properly so called should be “grounded in the future.” Tell us a bit more what you mean by that.

Even though there are some fine Christian artists out there doing innovative and imaginative work, much of what is promoted as “Christian art” is often a simple regurgitation of earlier forms, particularly from the Renaissance, but also in the endless iterations and appropriations of Eastern iconography. I don’t dislike the Renaissance, and I do pray before icons: but come on already. This “let’s make Christian art great again” schlock is setting back both Christianity and art—and not in the way its purveyors think. Let the dead bury their dead.

On the other hand, the appropriation of secular forms characteristic of much Christian popular “art,” particularly prevalent in Evangelical circles (such as in the dreadful God Is not Dead franchise and the phenomenon of “praise bands”) only shows, if anything, how incredibly inept Christian attempts at art can be. So maybe the Catholic-Orthodox propensity is to look to the past, while the Evangelical is to look to the present. Either way: it’s not working.

I get a surprising amount of poetry sent to Jesus the Imagination written in formal verse. Now, I have nothing against formal verse, but to assume that “Christian poetry” somehow has an allegiance to the august forms of the past is sheer ideology (the strange allegiance to “liberal education” among the same ilk is likewise performative….of something…but I don’t think it’s Christianity). Paul Claudel, T.S. Eliot, William Everson all may have appreciated tradition, but their poetry arrived from the future, and brought with it life.

For me, the paradigmatic figure of the Christian artist is not St. Luke or even St. Cecilia, but John the Baptist. He calls the Messiah from the future. That’s what Christian art should be doing now, even as, especially as, Christianity is dying. For we live in the most eschatological of times. Retreating to the imagined golden age of Christendom is to already admit defeat or at least irrelevance.

AD: Your chapter on education has, it seems to me, obvious echoes of Alasdair MacIntyre’s skepticism (in his Gifford Lectures, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry) about the fetish for “classical” education among some Christians today, and rightly notes how bloodless and joyless too many schools, Christian and public alike, are today. I also heard echoes of Ivan Illich when you say we need to stop thinking of education in the terms of “degree-granting institutions.” Though appreciative of much of what you learned as a Waldorf teacher, you want to go beyond that in part, if I'm not mistaken, because schools as they are currently structured function according to capitalist logic, not least in terms of their scheduling and timing, which do not allow for curious meanderings and wide-ranging exploration (the kind of “free association” method of Freud). I just finished Joshua Eyler’s fascinating new book How Humans Learn: The Science and Stories behind Effective College Teaching, and he argues in there that too many teachers and institutions today specialize in killing curiosity. Would the “hedge schools” you describe, based on Irish models, be a place for cultivating curiosity and the “contemplative engagement” you discuss in your last chapter?

What drew me to the Irish hedge schools was their incredibly bold and subversive aims. The Irish weren’t about to let their British overlords define what an Irish education could be; and if they had to do so in secret, so be it. We, especially in America but also in Europe and Australia from what I can tell, are typically at the mercy of our overlords, usually under the guise of accreditation and “best practices,” which are neither best nor practiced for the most part. This thinking also infects Waldorf schools (to a lesser degree, obviously) and nearly every other institutional educational model. The hedge school as I am envisioning it would be anything but institutional. Current educational models are based on the assembly line, usually with the goal of socialization in mind, but not always (a great book on the failure of most current educational models—and a fine proposal for a new one—is Kieran Egan’s The Educated Mind).

After almost thirty years of teaching—and I have taught everything from kindergarten to graduate school, including a stint as a Master Waldorf Teacher—I have seen how students best learn when given time to enter into subject matter through a contemplative engagement. But that takes time, and stopping to run to the next class when the bell rings (is this not the most Pavlovian of practices?) is an absolute obstacle to such engagement.

I also think contemplative engagement arises organically through involvement in the arts, both fine and practical. This is certainly something I learned—and saw—as a Waldorf teacher. In face of the increasing totalization of the internet and online “environments” in education it seems to be absolutely crucial that people actually learn how to do real stuff—like playing an instrument, carpentry, painting, gardening, archery… Of course, some people do these things, usually as specialists, but education should be that of a whole person, and a whole person should be able to do a little of all these things—and many more. It also drives fear away. People with broad exposure to different ideas, practices, and skills are naturally engaged with the world as a real thing. Nothing could be more sophiological.

AD: A devil’s advocate reading your fourth and fifth chapters might say “Okay, you start off by talking about what was lost in medieval England during and after the Reformation, move on to attack ‘Big Agriculture’ and ‘big tech’ and their ecologically (and other) disastrous practices, approvingly mention ‘community supported agriculture,’ and then call for ‘cultivating an authentic relationship to creation’ (126). How can I, just Joe Average in suburban America, be expected to put any of this into practice?”

An easy thing would be to join a CSA. What a subversive move! Food, Inc. is a dreadful and poisonous (literally) behemoth completely tied into the governmental/industrial/pharmacological complex. Not only buying direct from farmers, but getting to know them and the place where one’s food comes from ties one to nature, to the farmer, to the cosmos.

Not long ago I went to a Facebook distributist forum to ask if anyone there belonged to a CSA. Almost no one! Then I asked what the members did that was “distributist-y.” Most of what I heard was theme on variation of “I write a blog” or “I read Tolkien, Belloc, and Chesterton.” Take me now, Lord Jesus! Just getting freed from the meshes of the interNET and engaging the arts or practical activities (gardening is a good one) is another thing anyone—even Joe Average in suburbia—can do. There was life before television and the internet, even in suburbia. There still could be.

So let’s take suburbia as an example: ditch Chem Lawn! Turn your yard into an organic garden, and add a wayside shrine. Reclaim what you’ve been given to steward for the Kingdom.

Of course there are other things (avoiding plastic, for example). But I think the key (the sophiological key) is to do this out of a sense of joy and with an eye to the Glory of the Lord, not out of some guilt-ridden sense of unworthiness and despair that all too often turns misanthropic. The Kingdom of Heaven is among you. Intentionality means everything.


I agree with Patrick Deneen and Guido Preparata (begrudgingly) that significant change in the economic sphere might not be able to occur until the current “filthy, rotten system,” in Dorothy Day’s apt expression, finally atrophies and eats itself. But we can still do things that enact what Bulgakov calls “the sophianic economy.” As he writes in his The Philosophy of Economy, the purpose of economy, “is to defend and to spread the seeds of life, to resurrect nature. This is the action of Sophia on the universe in an effort to restore it to being in truth…. Economic activity overcomes the divisions in nature, and its ultimate goal…is to return the world to life in Sophia.” Anything working to this end, and joining a CSA is just one way, is engagement with the Real. As such, in our current economic realities, it is absolutely subversive as well as radically Christian in its reverence for the Creation and our role as stewards.

AD: Sum up your hopes for the book.

My greatest hope for the book is that it might shake people out of their complacency about accepting things as they are. Why do we accept the scientific, educational, artistic, and economic paradigms we’ve accidentally inherited as the only possibilities available to us? I also hope it might help some folks migrate away from the “bunker mentality” so characteristic of Christian “culture” at the moment. Playing martyr is too easy. And boring. Create the Kingdom instead.

AD: Having finished Transfiguration, what are you up to these days? Is there another book in the works?

Well, I have an edition of the satirical 17th century alchemical romance The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkruetz coming out very soon (though I finished almost two years ago). Also, I just started work on a second book on Sophiology. I hadn’t planned on it, but I felt a nudge to explore some ideas I didn’t have time for (and didn’t exactly fit) in The Submerged Reality. I wanted to more deeply investigate the Sophia figure in Gnosticism as well as the notion of the Shekinah in the Kabbalah, among other things. The project will also examine the sophiological insights of the poets William Blake, Thomas Traherne, and Eleanor Farjeon. Other than that, I’m pretty busy farming, beekeeping, and teaching.

Thomas Berry: A Biography

When, in the latter part of the 1980s, I was first learning about ecological issues and the Church's possible role in them, I came across the name of the Catholic priest and theologian Thomas Berry, whose writings on ecological stewardship long seem to have predated comparable writings on the same themes by, e.g., the bishops of either old or new Rome, or other Catholic and Orthodox figures generally.

Now Berry is the subject of a full-length biography I look forward to reading: Thomas Berry: A Biography by Mary Evelyn Tucker, John Grim, and Andrew Angyal (Columbia University Press, 2019), 360pp.

Thomas Berry (1914–2009) was one of the twentieth century’s most prescient and profound thinkers. As a cultural historian, he sought a broader perspective on humanity’s relationship to the earth in order to respond to the ecological and social challenges of our times. This first biography of Berry illuminates his remarkable vision and its continuing relevance for achieving transformative social change and environmental renewal.

Berry began his studies in Western history and religions and then expanded to include Asian and indigenous religions, which he taught at Fordham University, Barnard College, and Columbia University. Drawing on his explorations of history, he came to see the evolutionary process as a story that could help restore the continuity of humans with the natural world. Berry urged humans to recognize their place on a planet with complex ecosystems in a vast, evolving universe. He sought to replace the modern alienation from nature with a sense of intimacy and responsibility. Berry called for new forms of ecological education, law, and spirituality, as well as the creation of resilient agricultural systems, bioregions, and ecocities. At a time of growing environmental crisis, this biography shows the ongoing significance of Berry’s conception of human interdependence with the earth as part of the unfolding journey of the universe.

John Chryssavgis on Creation as Sacrament

I have used several of John Chryssavgis's books in classes over the years, and recommended to students still others. So when I saw in the most recent catalogue from T&T Clark that he has a new book out, of course I paid attention to: Creation as Sacrament: Reflections on Ecology and Spirituality (T&T Clark, 2019), 232pp.

About this book the publisher tells us the following:

John Chryssavgis explores the sacred dimension of the natural environment, and the significance of creation in the rich theological history and spiritual classics of the Orthodox Church, through the lens of its unique ascetical, liturgical and mystical experience.

The global ecological crisis affecting humanity's air, water, and land, as well as the planet's flora and fauna, has resulted in manifest fissures on the image of God in creation. Chryssavgis examines, from an Orthodox Christian perspective, the possibility of restoring that shattered image through the sacramental lenses of cosmic transfiguration, cosmic interconnection, and cosmic reconciliation. The viewpoints of early theologians and contemporary thinkers are extensively explored from a theological and spiritual perspective, including countering those who deny that God's creation is in crisis. Presenting a worldview advanced and championed by the Orthodox Church in the modern world, this book encourages personal and societal transformation in making ethical and economic choices that respect creation as sacrament.

On Fasting from Noise or Against Asceticism and Spirituality (II)

When we were last met to discuss Maggie Ross's wonderfully cool diagnosis of much that ails us, Silence: A User's Guide, I sketched out some of the background influences and concerns to this book, and to my reading of it. I also noted one or two places in the first part of the book where we get some hints of what is to come as we move now into the third chapter, "The Language of Silence," where Ross really lets fly, inveighing against many common, but even more commonly misunderstood and misapplied terms, concepts, and practices.

This entire third chapter, as I commented previously, really could bear the title "Glossary of Nonsense Terms Fatuously Flung About by Careless Christians." In the book it functions very much as an excursus between the background she lays out in chs.1-2, and the objections to silence in the rest of the book. I will only give you a taste, but the entire chapter is very much worth your time.

One of the biggest misunderstandings--as I have long thought myself--comes down to the primacy people give to the notion of "experience," which Ross says is "perhaps the most significant of the frequently misused words in this list." Experience, Ross says, is solipsistic in today's usage, running totally contrary to "ancient, patristic, and medieval" wariness of the term; it invites narcissism and notions of control.

Faith is another misused word--and here Ross agrees very much with Fr. Paul Tarazi, as his interview on here last week showed--because it refers, wrongly, to a set of abstract doctrines rather than the practice of trust.

Mystical/Mystic/Mysticism: All these terms "have become useless and misleading" and function to justify "weirdness," "exoticism," "voyeurism (a kind of spiritual pornography" (90). See below for more on the problems with "mysticism."

Spiritual Direction: I was moving from studying psychology to theology in the late 1990s when all of a sudden it seemed (as I noted in part I) that the study of something called "spirituality" exploded in revolting fashion, and along with it, very predictably, came the attempts to make money off that by people setting themselves up as "spiritual directors" everywhere, offering expensive courses in how you, too, could become a director, or at least benefit from on-going direction. A couple of these people to whom I spoke, including one woman in charge of just such a brand-new centre for spiritual direction and formation, were so dim and tedious, so incurious and uninformed about everything, that I felt myself falling rapidly into a coma after about two sentences.

But what these newly minted "spiritual directors" lacked in intellectual substance was more than made up for by the aggressively preening self-importance of their tone. All this is to say I greatly cheered Ross's denunciation of "spiritual direction, so-called" as having "little to no relationship to the desert practice of manifestation of thoughts. It evolved as a form of mind control." As she continues, "modern so-called spiritual direction is counter-productive and a distraction: it tends to make the 'directee' become increasingly preoccupied with his or her self-construct and imagined 'spiritual life' instead of moving towards self-forgetfulness in beholding the divine other."

After this swamp-clearing excursus, the rest of the book is a more extended critical analysis of how to practice silence and of the obstacles towards doing so. She begins chapter 4 by briefly surveying how few modern thinkers are interested in silence because they operate under a Cartesian method. Of the few who, she says, escape this influence to some extent, she cites the Canadians Charles Taylor and Bernard Lonergan; and the Greek Orthodox scholar John Panteleimon Manoussakis, whom I interviewed here.

One of the points Ross makes clear here, and elsewhere in the book, is that most of us have lost the capacity for observing how our minds work. Indeed, as Christopher Bollas (inter alia) has also recently noted, we live in a time that scorns the idea of thinking about our minds and the unconscious influences on them. But this loss, this refusal, this scorn, makes us incapable of enduring silence and so living in the wellsprings of the deep mind. Without this, we are bereft of what we need for any serious transfiguration in our life. (In this regard I would say that Ross's critique echoes those who suggest our reliance on overly hasty "cures" approved by modern "therapists" and pharmaceutical companies, and especially the insurance companies who pay the bills of both, are, as I suggested here, far less effective than the slower work of often silently lying on the couch of unknowing.)

It is that lack of control over "unknowing" that makes silence so suspect. Much of this and later chapters in her book are spent by Ross discussing problems with the many translations of the famous work The Cloud of Unknowing, almost all versions of which use the word "experience and other anachronisms" the effect of which is to "have obscured behold, so that it rarely appears." Beholding something, as she is at pains to show at length, is different from thinking we "experience" (and thus presumably, at least partially, control) it. It is the Gallacher edition of the Cloud (linked above and at left) that she says almost alone avoids this problem.

Later on she also decries the elimination of "behold" and cognates from modern biblical translations. This term, she says, is "arguably the most important word in the Bible..., which occurs more than 1300 times in the Hebrew and Greek" (179).

Lots of churchmen, she says, have been quite content to eliminate ideas of beholding and the silence which it requires, in part because both are suspect and hard to control. Of those very few not guilty of this, Ross cites some of the Desert Fathers and Mothers, including our old friend Evagrius, whom I have often cited on here and whom I taught to my students last semester. According to Ross, the writings of Evagrius "speak to human beings in every age....His advice is just as applicable today in an urban culture."

In the final part of the book Ross presents something of an apologia for the fruits of silence, noting that there is a reciprocal relationship: the more one enters into the silence of the deep mind, the more mind is released from tightly held ideas and hostile emotions, especially avarice, anger, and judgment. Instead of these, one emerges more compassionate, detached, and willing to forgive. At the same time, she notes, one's powers of discernment are heightened as silence encourages a ruthless honesty.

For those worried about the "political" implications of all this, Ross is clear in several places that emergence into silence does not give rise to a crabbed "me and my cell and the rest of you go to hell" Christianity. Rather, she says the ethics and politics of silence are "green" in caring for creation. Silence, she says, makes one simultaneously more liberal and more conservative: liberal in wanting to share the riches with everyone, and conservative in wanting to hang onto the experience of silence and protect it via a sort of "custody of the ears." Those who are immersed in silence come quickly to have a pronounced intolerance for reading about violence, for going to loud parties and pointless meetings, etc.

Finally, those who live in silence find there a refuge but not an escape. The silent are never at home in our culture again, but are able nonetheless to live because the richness of silence enables a life-sustaining transfiguration, which this book, Silence: A User's Guide, itself goes some very considerable distance to advancing in surprising and welcome ways.

Concluded. 

Christian Ecology East and West

Say what you will about the modern papacy--and I have--you cannot lay at its feet the complaint of it not making its views widely known. Thus, when the current pope of Rome relieved himself of some utterances about ecology recently, Laudato Si' was suddenly heard on the lips of hundreds of millions of people around the world who know nothing of what encyclicals are and knew not the Franciscan reference in that title. 

In early October, on the eve of the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi in the Latin calendar, the University of Saint Francis in Ft. Wayne is hosting a half-day conference on Laudato Si'. Details here. Admission is free. Come one, come all!

My own paper at the conference is entitled “Ecumenical Ecology: Pope Francis, Patriarch Bartholomew, and Caring for Creation.” In essence, I am going to show just how deeply indebted Pope Francis is to the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, who in many books (most edited by John Chryssavgis) over two decades and more has been arguing in favor of an integral ecology and showing that caring for creation is a deeply rooted Christian impulse and practice. See, e.g., Toward an Ecology of Transfiguration: Orthodox Christian Perspectives on Environment, Nature, and Creation. See earlier works such as On Earth As In Heaven: Ecological Vision and Initiatives of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew.

For wider-ranging collections treating ecological as well as many other topics, see  Speaking the Truth in Love: Theological and Spiritual Exhortations of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew

and

In the World, Yet Not of the World: Social and Global Initiatives of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew.

But if you don't have time to read all these books (or the patience to wade through papal ramblings and rantings), then just come hear me on Sat. Oct. 3 as I talk about the unprecedented papal borrowing of Orthodox thought and its official incorporation into a high-ranking (though not problem-free....) document of the Roman Magisterium.

Christianity and Ecological Responsibility

With rumors flying that the next papal utterance to which we are to be treated in encyclical form will cover the controverted and tiresome topic of global warming, it is interesting to note that Eastern Christianity has been addressing ecological concerns for quite some time now. Indeed, the Ecumenical Patriarch has sometimes been nick-named the "green patriarch" for his frequent discussions of ecological issues. At the same time, however, Orthodox theology has not developed as far as Catholic theology has when it comes to other social and economic issues. Catholic social teaching goes back well over a century while comparable Orthodox teaching is somewhat more recent on some questions. 

A new collection looks like it will go some way towards helping Orthodox theology further engage with some of the socio-economic and ecological questions of our time: John Chryssavgis and Michele Goldsmith, eds., Sacred Commerce: A Conversation on Environment, Ethics, and Innovation (Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2014), 152pp.

About this collection we are told:

In Sacred Commerce distinguished religious leaders, environmentalists, and businessmen share together their respective understandings and assessments concerning the present and future conditions of our planet. Well-known anthropologist Jane Goodall discusses biodiversity. Bill McKibben offers sobering statistics and a call for restraint. James Hansen addresses the present and future effects of climate change. Gary Hirshberg relates by example how a business can be successful and environmentally responsible. Amory Lovins reveals how the energy demand that fuels our businesses can be environmentally responsible. Richard Chartres discusses how we must exchange our economic calling, grow first and clean up later, for a new religious calling, one human race and one whole world. Metropolitan John (Zizioulas) of Pergamon offers insight on where we must go in the future. Sacred Commerce presents the creativity of business, the evidence of science, and the understanding of religion in a united effort for the welfare of not only industrialized countries, but for all human communities and living things now present on earth.

Holy Ecology

For many years now, the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople has been nicknamed the "green patriarch" for his outspoken stances on ecological issues. Many recent books have been published in recent years on Orthodox theology and ecological concerns, including this recent one:  Bruce V. Foltz, The Noetics of Nature: Environmental Philosophy and the Holy Beauty of the Visible (Fordham, 2013), 320pp.

About this book we are told:

Contemplative or "noetic" knowledge has traditionally been seen as the highest mode of understanding, a view that persists both in many non-Western cultures and in Eastern Christianity, where "theoria physike," or the illumined understanding of creation that follows the purification of the heart, is seen to provide deeper insights into nature than the discursive rationality modernity has used to dominate and conquer it.

Working from texts in Eastern Orthodox philosophy and theology not widely known in the West, as well as a variety of sources including mystics such as the Sufi Ibn 'Arabi, poets such as Basho, Traherne, Blake, Hölderlin, and Hopkins, and nature writers such as Muir, Thoreau, and Dillard, The Noetics of Nature challenges both the primacy of the natural sciences in environmental thought and the conventional view, first advanced by Lynn White, Jr., that Christian theology is somehow responsible for the environmental crisis.

Instead, Foltz concludes that the ancient Christian view of creation as iconic its "holy beauty" manifesting the divine energies and constituting a primal mode of divine revelation offers the best prospect for the radical reversal that is needed in our relation to the natural environment.

The "Green Patriarch"

The Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew has long been known for his ecological activism, as I have noted before.

Now Oxford University Press, next month, will bring out his latest reflections on the topic: On Earth As In Heaven: Ecological Vision and Initiatives of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew (Orthodox Christianity and Contemporary Thought) 384pp.

About this book, the publisher tells us:

Over the past two decades, the world has witnessed alarming environmental degradation--climate change, the loss of biodiversity, and the pollution of natural resources--together with a failure to implement environmental policies and an ever-widening gap between rich and poor. During this same period, one religious leader has discerned the signs of the times and called people's attention to our dire ecological and social situation: His All Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, the worldwide leader of the Orthodox Churches. As this new volume of his writings reveals, Patriarch Bartholomew has continually proclaimed the primacy of spiritual values in determining environmental ethics and action. For him, the predicament we face is not primarily ecological but in fact spiritual: The ultimate aim is to see all things in God, and God in all things.

On Earth as in Heaven demonstrates just why His All Holiness has been dubbed the "Green Patriarch" by former Vice President Al Gore (recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize for his environmental activism) and the media. This third and final volume of the spiritual leader's selected writings showcases his statements on environmental degradation, global warming, and climate change. It contains numerous speeches and interviews in various circumstances, including ecological symposia, academic seminars, and regional and international events, over the first twenty years of his ministry. This volume also encompasses a selection of pastoral letters and exhortations--ecclesiastical, ecumenical, and academic--by His All Holiness for occasions such as Easter and Christmas, honorary doctorates, and academic awards.

On Earth as in Heaven is a rich collection, essential for religious scholars, those looking for a deeper understanding of Orthodox Christianity, and anyone concerned with the environmental and social issues we face today.

On Not Selling One's Soul for a Mess of Green Pottage

For some time now, the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, pictured above, has been acclaimed as the "green patriarch" for his activities and vocal insistence that Christians must be good stewards of creation. But there is more going on here than fastening on to some  ecological-theological principle. Fastening on to an issue like this has ensured that the Ecumenical Patriarchate attracts some attention from the bien-pensants to its beleaguered situation in Constantinople, where Christians are fast disappearing. Unlike the Vatican, the Phanar has very little ability to draw media attention, and so environmentalism has become the only card in its deck, and as a consequence is played regularly. Lest we be scandalized by the politics of this, remember that a Christian must, after all, be as wise as a serpent and innocent as a dove. But is environmentalism innocent and pure as the driven snow?

His ecological thoughts are gathered together in a collection recently published by Eerdmans:

John Chryssavgis, ed., Cosmic Grace, Humble Prayer: the Ecological Vision of the Green Patriarch Bartholomew, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2009), xii+393pp. 

Cosmic Grace contains a foreword from John Zizioulas. It has been superbly edited and introduced by John Chryssavgis. His introduction, in fact, helps to clarify some of Patriarch Bartholomew’s points and to give them a stronger theological under-girding. This is an important service of Chryssavgis because several Orthodox theologians have sharply questioned the patriarch’s overwrought focus on ecology to the near-total neglect of much more serious issues such as abortion, and wondered aloud on Orthodox websites whether the patriarch was not being manipulated to provide window-dressing for “global warming” activists whose “scientific” case has become a shambles. None has given more eloquent expression to this unease than the Orthodox priest Fr. Johannes Jacobese, whose numerous critical reflections are invaluable and must be read alongside this book.