Our unique task as stewards and caretakers of “this fragile earth, our island home,” as Eucharistic Prayer C puts it, is to participate in the unfolding of God’s new creation inaugurated in the resurrection of Jesus.
Wendell Berry, this great Bard — as great an American voice as Thoreau’s or Whitman’s — assumes that the reality before and all around us in nature is infinitely complex and therefore cannot be fully comprehended by any human intellect.
The earth is fundamentally a religious place — a place of belonging and of worship. It is a place of holy sacrifice, with its highest expression in the Christian sacraments, which “rehearse the solution that previous explorations of the sacred could not find, which is the self-sacrifice of God” (p. 20).
Reason, the thing that separates us from brute beasts, does not liberate us from animality, but it liberates animality itself, for the actualization of a potential that cannot be actualized without reason.
Canadian Anglicans have added a vow about environmentalism to their baptismal covenant. I worry that making environmental activism fundamental to Christian baptism obscures what is more fundamental to it.
Divestment seems to amount to little more than moral posturing, however well intended, when the world needs genuine, thoughtful, and powerful action on the environment now more than ever.
