This world is not my home?

I heard a quote supposedly attributed to evangelist Billy Graham (I have no idea if he said it), shown in the image here

As an ecotheologian or Christian writer/thinker, I don't find this a particularly helpful idea. Indeed, it's not even biblical.

I spoke this weekend at a conference of Franciscans on climate change. In their bible study just before my talk they were looking at the Lord's prayer. God's will is to be done on Earth as it is in Heaven; indeed Earth is in the emphatic position. Combine that for example with Romans 8 where creation has a future at the resurrection, and such silliness is undone. To be in the world but not of the world means not to be a part of a culture of sin. It does not refer to God's good Earth, which itself will be liberated.

Ride to Worship Week 2012

For the planet, the poor and your health, join in Ride to Worship Week 2012

 

The third annual Ride to Worship Week runs from Friday 5th to Thursday 11th October 2012.  To join in the fun, all you need to do is to cycle, walk, or use another form of environmentally friendly transport to get to and from worship. You can join in as an individual, a family, or as a whole church.  And if the scheduled dates don't suit, feel free to choose another time that does. Check out the Ride to Worship Week clip, read more about Ride to Worship Week, and register your participation at www.arrcc.org.au/ride-to-worship-week-2012.  Ride to Worship Week is an initiative of the Australian Religious Response to Climate Change (ARRCC).

 

Presentations

One of the things I really like doing is speaking - underwater with a mouthful of marbles if need be. Apart from my day job that involves me presenting material, I get asked to speak at conferences, churches and so on. Most recently I spoke at the Ethos conference in Melbourne, where the invited speakers were  Sylvia Keesmaat and Brian Walsh. My workshop was on the groaning of creation in Romans 8, and what that might mean for an ecotheology/ecomissiology.

Then, I went to the TEAR gathering in Helensburgh (south of Sydney), which again featured Keesmaat and Walsh. This time, it was a workshop on talking about climate change in the church. I may work on a booklet (pdf) to download when I have more time.

Finally, I got to speak at a Franciscan Conference at Trinity College here in Melbourne, again on climate change and theological reflection.

I'm usually useless at emailing people my slides so I've decided to use Slideshare to upload them. The links follow. Note that they can be downloaded.

Groaning with creation
Communicating for change
A changing climate

The song of the magpie

Ok so I've been slack - it's been a while. So many environmentally related days, Rio, it all seems like so much to write on, so much to absorb. So I'll start with something simple.

When I was a kid, we lived in rental houses on farms. Both parents were older and on pensions so they were cheap. In one place there was a huge gum tree (well it seemed huge to me when I was 10 or 11) in which galahs and magpies roosted at nights. I loved watching them settle from a distance; I learned to love Australian fauna.

This morning on the way to the tram stop I heard the familiar warble of a magpie song and looked up to see a young one singing. It is one of the most beautiful sounds in all of creation to my ears. And it struck me. Magpies are not eaten, they are so common few people would reflect upon them and I guess an overseas birdwatcher might not have them at the top of their bucketlist, you can find them in most suburban areas.

Yet, it is their beauty and also apparent ordinariness that reminds me of Psalm 104 (ESV)

¹⁶ The trees of the Lord are watered abundantly,
     the cedars of Lebanon that he planted.
¹⁷ In them the birds build their nests;
    the stork has her home in the fir trees.

These creatures live along side of us, independent of us in the sense of not really being for us, or needs or economy and yet God cares for them, they are important to him. They are dependent upon us for the way in which we modify their environment by clearing trees, warming the planet and so on.

Hence, I am reminded of God's care for all he has made, that not all things are simply for me but for his glory and I need to 'live and let live'. Yet also I can enjoy them in a similar way to God, being made in his image.

Liberated Carbon song

Wonders of creation: Portuguese Man o War

As an aspiring ecotheologian I spend a fair time worrying about the state of the planet, global warming, species loss, etc. It occurred to me recently that I don't spend enough time thinking about and enjoying the very thing I want to see looked after. This is the first in a series of blog entries featuring photos I've taken of things that have caught my eye.

Over Christmas 2011 my family and I stayed in the sleep village of Loch Sport, located along the 90 Mile Beach in the Lakes District of Gippsland (map here). I found a few of these Portuguese Man o War on the beach.

The Portuguese Man o War is also known as the Blue Bottle for obvious reasons. They are named Portuguese Man o War because the gas filled bladder looks like the sail of the ship of the same name. A Portuguese Man o War is not jelly fish but a member of the Siphonophorae order, a colonial animal consisting of different zooids or polyps which cannot exist independently.

The four polyps are the gas bladder (pneumatophore), the tentacles (which can reach up to 50 metres in length), the digestive organs and the reproductive organs. Note that the Portuguese Man o War is a carnivore, the tentacles are covered in venom-filled nematocysts which paralyse prey before muscles in the tentacles draw the prey up to the digestive organs. One of these tentacles is shown in the picture above and they can still contain venom even after the Man O War has died and is washed up on the beach, so avoid contact. While rarely fatal to humans, they are (apparently) very painful, and I was sure that myself, son and dog avoided them. In Australia there are more than 10,000 reported stings each year!

Their range is typically more equatorward than where I found these, preferring warmer waters. With no means of propulsion, the Man O War is at the mercy of wind and waves, so perhaps the warm current along the east coast of Australia moved them southward before becoming beached where I found them.


Further reading
National Geographic
Jellyfish sting statistics
Siphonophores.org

Katherine Hayhoe on her book

Katherine Hayhoe talks about being a climate scientist and a Christian and about the book she wrote with her husband, an Evangelical pastor. Book review to appear in Zadok Perspectives next year.