The ethics of climate change

The ethics of climate change with Stephen Bouma-Prediger

Climate change explained cartoon style

"Creation's Care and Keeping" issue of Theological Forum

Theological Forum Issue

Vol. XIX, No. 4, December 1991

CREATION'S CARE
AND KEEPING

 
From the Editor - Paul G. Schrotenboer
Creation's Care and Keeping: A Reformed Perspective - Calvin B. DeWitt
Creation and Spirituality: A Perspective from Christianity - Wesley Granberg-Michaelson

Book Review - The Environment and the Christian, Calvin DeWitt, editor. Reviewed by Paul G. Schrotenboer.

In praise of slow reading

Ray Pennings points to the Slow Reading Movement mentioned in the Guardian. Slow is the new fast. John Newkirk, a professor of English at the University of New Hampshire, has some helpful advice to help us slow read:

• Memorizing: Memorization is often called “knowing by heart,” and for good reason. Memorizing enables us to possess a text in a special way.
• Reading Aloud: Reading aloud is a regular activity in elementary classrooms, but it dies too soon. Well-chosen and well-read texts are one of the best advertisements for literacy. By reading aloud, teachers can create a bridge to texts that students might read; they can help reluctant readers imagine a human voice animating the words on the page.
• Attending to Beginnings: Writers often struggle with their beginnings because they are making so many commitments; they are establishing a voice, narrator, and point of view that are right for what will follow. These openings often suggest a conflict. They raise a question, pose a problem, create an “itch to be scratched.” Readers need to be just as deliberate and not rush through these carefully constructed beginnings. As teachers, we can model this slowness.
• Rethinking Time Limits on Reading Tests: We currently give students with disabilities additional time to complete standardized tests; we should extend this opportunity to all students. Tests place too high a premium on speed, and limits are often set for administrative convenience rather than because of a reasoned belief in what makes good readers.
• Annotating a Page: In this activity, students probe the craft of a favorite writer. They pick a page they really like, photocopy it, and tape the photocopy to a larger piece of paper so they have wide margins in which they can make notations. Their job is to give the page a close reading and mark word choices, sentence patterns, images, dialogue—anything they find effective. A variation of this activity is a quote and comment assignment in which students copy out passages by hand that they find particularly meaningful and then comment on why they chose those passages. Copying a passage slows us down and creates an intimacy with the writer’s style—a feel for word choice and for how sentences are formed.
• Reading Poetry: Even in this age of efficiency and consumption, it is unlikely that anyone will reward students for reading a million poems. Poems can’t be checked off that way. They demand a slower pace and usually several readings—and they are usually at their best when read aloud.
• Savoring Passages: Children know something that adults often forget—the deep pleasure of repetition, of rereading, or of having parents reread, until the words seem to be part of them.

How To Write Good

How To Write Good

by Frank L. Visco

My several years in the word game have learnt me several rules:

1. Avoid alliteration. Always.
2. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
3. Avoid cliches like the plague. (They're old hat.)
4. Employ the vernacular.
5. Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
6. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.
7. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
8. Contractions aren't necessary.
9. Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.
10. One should never generalize.
11. Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: "I hate quotations. Tell me what you know."
12. Comparisons are as bad as cliches.
13. Don't be redundant; don't more use words than necessary; it's highly superfluous.
14. Profanity sucks.
15. Be more or less specific.
16. Understatement is always best.
17. Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.
18. One-word sentences? Eliminate.
19. Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.
20. The passive voice is to be avoided.
21. Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.
22. Even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.
23. Who needs rhetorical questions?

Vote for policies

Here's another useful website that will help you choose who to vote for based on policies and not personalities:

Lovelock on the origins of the Gaia hypothesis

James Lovelock on Gaia: a final warning

Vision - Creation care issue

Vision: a Journal for Church and Theology is an Anabaptist journal available here.
Volume 9 Number 1 is devoted to 'Creation care' and is available here as a pdf. The article by Steve Bouma-Prediger is well worth checking out.

Biblical Prophets and Contemporary Environmental Ethics

Biblical Prophets and Contemporary Environmental Ethics
Re-Reading Amos, Hosea, and First Isaiah
Hilary Marlow
Oxford University Press, 2009
978-0-19-956905-2
338pp +xvi




Academic tomes have a tendency to be boring, inaccessible to non-specialists, without cultural relevance beyond the ivory tower and have unaesthetic covers. This book defies the stereotype in every way. Despite being the product of a Cambridge PhD, under Katherine Dell, it is readable, accessible, and will have an impact within and without the academia - and has a great cover to boot!

Hilary Marlow has been associated with most British evangelical organisations. She is a director of Director of the John Ray Initiative, has been involved with  A Rocha for over a decade, until recently she was a Research Associate in Theology and Science at the Faraday Institute, has written for the Jubilee Trust  and Grove Books and is at present involved in a project with the Kirby Laing Institute for Christian Ethics based at Tyndale House, Cambridge. She has also found time to complete her PhD and this book is the product of that.

The first chapter takes an overview of creation in church history, it is a broad brush view but is full of insight - I made a long list of further avenues to explore as a result of it. She starts - rather predictably - with Lynn White Jr's critique before looking at some theological perspectives on creation. This stems from the early church with its Greek influences to Calvin via the Cappodocians and Aquinas. She mentions that Irenaeus sees Adam typologically, but I'm not certain that this is a true picture.  Tony Lane argues that 'Irenaeus's theology is undermined more than most others by the suggestion of a non-historical Adam' (Darwin Creation and the Fall p. 141). This, of course is a minor quibble. 

She draws upon a number of important secondary sources including Glacken, Harrison, McGrath, Santmire.

Chapter 2 takes the historical perspective on from the sixteenth century. She looks at the divide between history and nature. Von Rad and Eichrodt are singled out for their Hegelian influences which allows them to set up a dualism of nature and history. Following Brueggeman, Marlow agrees that this led to an abandonment and marginalisation of serious thinking about the creation in biblical theology.

Two theologians helped to reverse this trend: Bernhard Anderson and Claus Westermann. As a result many others challenged the setting up of history over creation. Theodore Hiebert, Ronald Simkins and William Brown an three that Marlow briefly focuses on. She rightly notes that these three have helped towards a corrective reading of the Old Testament.

The developoment of an ecological hermeneutic is the subject of chapter 3. Here Norman Habel's Earth Bible Project (EBP) is examined. Taking a cue from feminist theologies the EBP stands with the oppressed Earth in dialogue with the text.

The emphasis on methodology and the methodoogy itself is criticised. As Marlow points out Bouma-Preideger comes up with a similar but more biblically robust set of guidelines. Following Christopher J. H.  Wright's hermeutical triangle God (Israel/humanity and Land/ earth) she forms an ecological triangle: God at the apex and a base of humanity and the non-human creation. It is the interrelationship between these three vertices that are examined in the next three chapters. Three important questions are also posed (p. 111):

1. What understanding of the non-human creation does the text present
2. What assumptions are made about YHWH's relationship to the created world and how he acts in it?
3. What effect do the actions  and choices of human beings have on the non-human creation and vice versa?

Chapters  4-6 look at Amos, Hosea and Is 1-39 in light of these questions and the ecological triangle.  She provides a detailed exegesis and analysis of key passages from these prophets. In Amos the non-human creation plays an important role, 'the natural world engages in a "dialogue" with its creator' (p 157). In Hosea it has less of a role and the emphasis is on God and humanity, but this relationship when broken does have a marked effect on the earth.  Finally, in Is 1-39 there is a link between humanity, God and the rest of creation in that 'natural' disaster is a consequence of disobedience to God and this broken relationship is shown in metaphors and parables of the natural world.

The final chapter looks at the implications of the foregoing for an environmental ethic. Here she starts by providing a broad overview on using the Bible in ethics. The issue of how we move from the scriptures to any ethic is problematic. I was suprised to read a criticism of  Walter Kaiser, she writes 'His study is based on a high view of biblical authority, and this theological perspective colours his selection and interpretation of texts' (p. 248).  All theological perspectives are coloured, theology is never neutral. It left me wondering what is Marlow's view of the authority of scripture and how has that has shaped her choice of passages?

She then turns to environmental ethics in particular. She looks at some key issues; including: what is the value ascribed to the non-human creation? Is it intrinsic or instrumental? Is nature a stable entiry or in flux? and the tension between nature and culture.  She concludes that the prophets recognise instrumental value but also give the non-human creation a value that is greater than any utilitarian one. She does not address the issue of how anything can have intrinsic value,  unless it is value given to it by God - and in which case it is not intrinsic. For the other issues she sees an ambiguity in the prophets.

Few other books have examined the Old Testament in the light of the current environemtal issues. Two other books are by Cyril Rodd Glimpses of a Strange Land  (T&T Clark, 2001) which deals with some individual texts and Chris Wright's Old Testament Ethics for the People of God (IVP, 2004) which takes a broad brush approach. Marlow's book is an example of how to interpret scripture in the light of contemporary issues and how to understand contemporary issues in the light of scripture. It shows that we have not exhausted the scriptures in what it can say to  environmental ethics. As Marlow concludes:

'it is vital that the church be better informed of the rich contribution of its own scriptures to a positive understanding of the creation as a basis for raising awareness of environmental issues and promoting good practice amiong its own members and the wider community'.

I wholeheartedly agree.



Contents
Foreword by John Barton
Introduction
1: Creation in Church History
2: Nature Versus History: An Artificial Divide
3: Ecological Hermeneutics: Meaning and Method
4: Who Can But Prophesy? Creation Dialogue in the Book of Amos
5: The People do not Know: Covenantal Failure in the Book of Hosea
6: The Vineyard of the Lord of Hosts: YHWH, the People and the Land in Isaiah 1-39
7: The Old Testament Prophets and Environmental Ethics: A Dialogue

Publisher's website


Available in the UK from:
amazon.co.uk
eden
book depository

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