And God Saw That It Was Good Edited by Drew Christiansen and Walter Grazer The Best Preaching on Earth Edited by Stan L LeQuire
Simpson, William
GREEN TALK FROM PULPITS And God Saw That It Was Good Catholic Theology and the Environment Drew Christiansen and Walter Grazer, eds. United States Catholic Conference, $24.95, 354 pp. The...
...This is preached with utter lucidity by Myron Augsburger: "For many, this gap (be-tween haves and have-nots) is about the extent to which people share in the benefits of creation-land, clean air, fresh water...
...The physical sci-ences-biochemistry, evolutionary bi-ology, physics, the climate sciences, oceanography-rightly claim authori-tative jurisdiction over knowledge of the earth's systems, causation within them, and projections about the futures of these ecologies...
...The books' silence about some previous and often exaggerated concerns is as im-portant and instructive as their overt claims...
...Evangelical Environmental Network and ludson Press, $16,221 pp...
...And by Bob Seiple: "Why would Christians care about the envi-ronment...
...After a long, noisy public relations crescendo and much cri-sis mongering and panic peddling among religious groups, political activists, and a most solicitous media culture, the en-vironmental apocalypse has been post-poned...
...While his conclusion, as a professor of envi-ronmental studies, is somewhat pre-dictable, his hermeneutic is free-ranging...
...Trulear drops only one-and-a-half shoes in this sermon...
...And he ad-mits that these practices are not well understood and need much rehearsal and development...
...The Best Preaching en Earth Sermons on Caring for Creation Stan L. LeQuire, ed...
...Paul Brand shows by anecdote how land-use choice is a form of determin-ism for the poor, with one outcome in Bangladesh, another outcome in North America...
...they draw us from being outsiders into being in-siders...
...Eugene Peterson shows a mas-tery of how biblical texts come to life in contemporary speech: "Metaphor and simile do not explain [nature...
...But a handful of inspired people cannot carry all this responsibility in a few lectures, books, and sermons...
...Two recent books collect a number of voices and point to new directions, sub-ject matters, and methods for religious argument about the environment...
...And the U.S...
...the creative origins of the en-tire universe...
...Some themes stand out in these re-markably encouraging writings...
...Because left unattended, the environment becomes a poverty issue...
...He examines the liturgy of the hours, the pluriform meanings of the symbols of water, tech-nologically produced bread and wine, and their analogical meanings in rela-tion to nature's life systems...
...These are novel and wel-come arguments in environmental dis-course...
...Sustained reading, critical argument, and the ca-pacity for doubt and dissent are the working relationships that religionists must build with the environmental sci-ences...
...Nonuniformity and a profound pluralism is the rule for envi-ronmental analysis, spiritual inclusion, and public action...
...1:28) can explain the rise and now the alleged collapse of Western philosophy, theology, patriarchy, and re-lated fragments of a civilization gone wrong...
...The emperor] Domitian still runs the city...
...It is a wonderful and even breathtaking piece of comprehension, question-raising, and suggestive argu-ment...
...effective changes for the better in one region would be irra-tional elsewhere...
...Calvin DeWitt uses "The Price of Gopher Wood" in Noah's ark to jux-tapose the value in the book of Job...
...First, justice for the environment must include, and cannot ignore, justice for the poor on whom environmental dam-age inflicts the harshest costs...
...But, in truth, the work of environmental justice has barely begun...
...And Harold Dean Trulear weaves a spec-tacular verbal tapestry comparing the city of Laodicea, a location of apocalyptic pro-jections in the book of Revelation, with Paterson, New Jersey...
...And J. Alfred Smith preaches gracefully about actions against ghetto poverty in Oakland, building the virtue of tranquillity and how nature as such, enduring strains of suffering and degra-dation, can generate the discipline of tranquillity...
...it's not clear in his vision whether the Passaic River basin shows much environmental promise or not...
...In the USCC book, a paper by David Toolan, S.J., shoulders the entire burden of making theological sense of the nat-ural sciences...
...We are easily ma-neuvered, almost at will, by scientists' press releases promoting particular causes, and by what activist leaders want us to believe about the conditions of our environment...
...Philip Yancey, who writes a very critical and imaginative column in Christianity Today, suggests in his sermon that "nature gives off mixed signals," so the argument from design may be quite majestic but not very comforting to hu-mans or to nature's victims...
...Scientists are also pressing questions of ultimacy about the technologies of nature's systems and groups...
...Our love for creation entails an intel-lectual love for the same world that sci-entists have been parsing and theorizing about with commanding results...
...William Simpson Environmental theologians now struggle to untangle themselves from the col-lapse of the death-of-nature rhetoric that they so eagerly joined over the last dozen years...
...Catholic Con-ference continues its valuable teaching role with eight academic-style argu-ments, plus the papal message of 1990, "The Ecological Crisis," six very differ-ent bishops' conference statements, and some quite usable material for parish teaching and the critical watching of public relations events and commer-cial news stories about the environment...
...The details, the evi-dence, the examples, the search for dis-cipline in these papers and sermons lift into full clarity the difficulty that lies ahead of this empirical theological task...
...he just doesn't live here any more...
...By contrast, the evangelical preachers are learned, inspired, independent, Protestant, not hung up, and have much to teach the academic teachers about how the Bible can work in contemporary culture...
...and the freedom, lawful-ness, and chaos within the natural world that we are said to have despoiled or ruined...
...A third theme is fluency with Scrip-ture...
...This is a very large teaching challenge that theologians have barely begun to address, and we need to hear more from them...
...Unfortunately, he is the only preacher in this col-lection who shows a willingness to enter that debate in sermonic form...
...The fourth theme is the understand-ing, the teaching, and the criticism of scientific expertise...
...Anne Clifford's paper, "Founda-tions for a Catholic Theology of God," shows that, to some extent, academic the-ologians are still hung up on how au-thoritative Genesis narratives need to be for a doctrine of creation, and whether or not the clause "man shall have do-minion" (Gen...
...The statements of the six Catholic bishops' conferences about conditions in Australia, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Lombardy (Italy), the Philip-pines, and the United States center on the theme of complexity and pluralism...
...Most religious people are very distant from the truth of these findings and the experience of what they might mean...
...And John Haught's book The Promise of Nature, closely related to his essay, included here, provides much help...
...Religious symbols built on nostalgia, or spiritual insights that generate emo-tional caricature, or disciplines that pro-ject Fifty Things You Can Do to Save the Earth, all vie for religious allegiance with the techniques of the TV commer-cial and the purposes of the media event...
...So religious communities are at least half-a-century off the pace in reck-oning with the truths and the mistakes of this scientific imagination...
...Kevin Erwin's very fine essay, "The Sacramentality of Creation and the Role of Creation in Liturgy and Sacraments," addresses this problem directly, from within the Catholic tradition, and with some constructive results...
...But he can get to that problem another time...
...Each situation shows vast differences from every other...
...The Evangelical Environmental Net-work has chosen to publish twenty-two sermons, most of them preached at churches, chapels, and regional confer-ences in North America, that are not di-rected to academic experts and policy makers...
Vol. 124 • July 1997 • No. 13
