By Chad Crawford •
March 28, 2008
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Candlelit services are nothing new for religious organizations. So when businesses, governments, and individuals turn off their lights Saturday at 8 p.m. local time, churches, synagogues, and mosques will be holding special gatherings. This global event is the second annual Earth Hour, the creation of the World Wildlife Fund to inspire people to take action on climate change.
In Toronto, The Church of the Holy Trinity in conjunction […]
By Chad Crawford •
March 21, 2008
A handful of major religious institutions have made environmental statements recently. The Vatican added pollution to the list of the new seven deadly sins. Southern Baptists compare destroying the planet to tearing pages out of the Bible. Mormons are reminding followers that their original founders were early environmentalists.
In light of these statements, Easter celebrators might want to reflect on how the story of Easter relates to the environment.
Theologian Herman-Emiel Mertens writes,
“Those who do not understand the link between the Easter message and ecological problems, do not understand anything of either. Environmentalism in itself is of course no utterance of Easter faith. Many non-Christians are concerned about this. That is only right and proper. A monopolizing of these earthly cares by Christians is out of the question. There is environmentalism without Easter faith, but no Easter faith without environmentalism.” (Not the Cross, but the Crucified, 207)
By Chad Crawford •
March 10, 2008
Some churches will be a little more green this Sunday, and not just because it falls on the eve of St. Patty’s Day.
Thanks to Dean A. Current, who has spent years developing methods for sustainable palm harvesting, churches now have a green option for buying palms.
Current is a research associate for University of Minnesota’s Department of Forest Resources. He has worked with Rainforest Alliance to prevent over-harvesting palms each year, make sure less palms are wasted, and give harvesters in Guatemala a fair wage for their efforts. Twenty-five percent of the program’s revenue goes right back into the communities where the palms are harvested.
By Chad Crawford •
March 3, 2008
A barefoot woman learns the language of the local indigenous tribe, and cultivates her own spirituality based on their deep spiritual connection to the Earth. This woman was a highly educated Mexican nun and playwright who lived during the 17th century.
The Boston Globe published an article today about Nina M. Scott, a retired University of Massachusetts Amherst professor of Spanish Literature. Instead of chocolate, Scott has chosen to give up carbon this Lent. She is doing a few extra things to reduce her carbon footprint, such as hanging her clothes up instead of using a drier and carpooling to use less fuel.
“For me it’s that connection between protecting nature and faith,” she says. She and a dozen of her friends at Grace Episcopal Church in Amherst first got the idea when they heard about two Church of England bishops who encouraged parishioners to go on a low carbon diet for Lent. (Check out my article, “What Does Lent Have to Do With Sharpening Green Habits?”)
The Globe article also mentioned this past weekend’s Yale Divinity School’s conference “Renewing Hope: Pathways to Religious Environmentalism.” This is the conference that screened the film Renewal, which I wrote about last week. The Globe pointed out the conference to illustrate the movement that is taking place, that religions are becoming enlightened to their environmental responsibilities.
By Chad Crawford •
February 29, 2008
Known as the “Green Patriarch,” Bartholomew I, the leader of 300 million Orthodox Christians, celebrates his 17th birthday this Leap Day. At age 68, his health has been slowly declining for decades. This has led supporters of his environmental achievements to begin speculating about whether his successor will continue his green legacy.
Bartholomew first earned his reputation with the statement, “Crime against the natural world is a sin.” His grandest endeavor was inviting 200 scientists, journalists, and political leaders to hang out with him on a cruise ship. They traveled around the Adriatic Sea to observe the ecological degradation taking place. During the symposium, he persuaded Pope John Paul II to adopt his agenda.
By Chad Crawford •
February 25, 2008
More and more people each day are joining the sustainable table. I am not referring to the wonderful website about healthy and ethical food choices, but heck it’s worth a mention anyway. By “the sustainable table,” I mean the conversation about how to bring the vision of a greener world into reality. So when I read “Evangelical leaders host ‘creation care’ summit in Orlando-area church” in the Orlando Sentinel, I got this funny picture in my head of church folk sitting down for brunch with a bunch of barefoot tree-huggers.
“‘We are the ones who are late to the table,’ [Rev. Joel] Hunter said. An emerging national evangelical leader on environmental issues, Hunter said the goal of the conference was to ‘get mutually stirred up’ and to ‘assume stewardship’ of this issue.”
Evangelical leaders gathered at Northland, a Church Distributed to hammer out “creation care.” If these green evangelicals are beginning to embrace terms like “sustainable,” “green,” and even “carbon neutral,” but still shudder at the sound of “environmentalism,” are we really all sitting at the same table? Or are we sitting at completely different tables, looking at the same evidence, but pretending to ignore each other’s solutions?
By Chad Crawford •
February 21, 2008
Buddhist monks are ordaining trees. Future Jewish leaders are learning about sustainable living. Evangelical Christians are fighting mountain top removal. Muslims are giving away organic meat to the poor during Ramadan.
These are just a handful of the stories told by veteran filmmakers Terry Kay Rockefeller and Marty Ostrow in their upcoming documentary, Renewal.
RENEWAL is the first feature-length documentary to capture the breadth and vitality of America’s religious-environmental movement. In rural communities, suburbs and cities, people of faith are rolling up their sleeves in practical and far-reaching ways. Offering a profound message of hope, RENEWAL shows individuals and communities driven by the deepest source of inspiration - their spiritual and religious convictions - being called to re-examine what it means to be human and how we live on this planet .
By Chad Crawford •
February 18, 2008
Fish burgers are back on the restaurant menus. It must be Lent again.
Marking the beginning of the Easter season, worshipers go to church on Ash Wednesday (often still recovering from Fat Tuesday) and get ash spread on their foreheads. The ash is a symbol of contrition and repentance. Then everyone is expected to give up meat and beer and act gloomy for the next 6 weeks. Sound like fun? No wonder Mardi Gras is so popular!
But when you think about it, a collective confession can be incredibly meaningful in light of our complicity in greenhouse gas emissions. The tradition of Lent has potential for inspiring action. In addition to repentance, the ritual of smearing carbon on faces can visually represent the carbon we are contributing in our daily lives. The following are some reformulations of the elements of Lent with a green focus. (These principles are intended to be helpful to people of any faith background or none at all.)
By Max Lindberg •
February 16, 2008
You may recognize that quote from the bible as Jesus tells those of little faith they can “Say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there and it will move.’ “
It’s kind of ironic that officials in California are placing their faith in mustard seed as a home-grown feedstock for biodiesel fuel, to move their busses from “here to there.”
Monterey-Salinas Transit has proposed producing its own sustainable biodiesel fuel for its fleet operations, planting the […]
Last week, leaders of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish faiths formed a pact to fight global warming. They delivered a letter to the White House and Congress announcing their alliance and calling on lawmakers to create limits on carbon global warming pollution.
Citing the Koran, the Hebrew Bible, and the teachings of Jesus Christ, the interfaith body declared global warming “a moral issue” in An Interfaith Declaration on the Moral Responsibility of the
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