Category:Eco-Theology

Our blue-green 'Living Earth' message is circling the world...

SJS/GreenPolicy360 siterunner: About the time I began work in Santa Fe on a new Green platform, the US National Council of Churches and, earlier, the World Council of Churches (I now find out in 2026) was also working on a sacred Earth-centered statement of ideals and ideas...

Here, on our GreenPolicy360 'Eco-Theology' page, we tip our green cap to all the faith/religious groups, the beliefs, denominations, and spiritual/ethical traditions that have over decades acted to bring a message of life, of valuing, preserving and protecting life on Earth.

We, at GreenPolicy360, remember the importance of the sacred over the millennia and we, together, join in with the the message of the World Council of Churches and the US National Council of Churches.

Justice, peace and the integrity of creation

• https://nationalcouncilofchurches.us/common-witness/gods-sacred-earth-a-renewed-commitment-2024/

• https://share.google/rELzlcYfzM4BLSWKt

• https://share.google/5be97UIA28LA80H5T

As a teacher of GreenPolicy360's siterunner said back in the 1970s at the New School in New York, as written in her book The Human Condition, the contemplative life (vita contemplativa), meditation on the sacred and the paths of life, can bring an active life (vita activa) with deep value.

Here, we look at the deep value of a joining of eco-ethics with eco-spirituality and eco-theology.

And let us remember what a famed scientist said in California at CalTech, as The Modern Environmental Movement was starting up and the good scientist, a man with humor and amazing ability to reach and teach students, was overheard by a young Los Angeles student who listened and agreed --

"We are children of the Earth" -- Richard Feynman, Physicist/Educator

Here, a half century plus later, we 'flash forward' in time to Santa Fe (a city of "Holy Faith" of St. Francis) and highlight a Buddhist teacher, who brings a thoughtful and engaged tradition along with her --

"I cannot promise that the world will be repaired. I have watched too much go unrepaired to say that honestly, and at eighty-four I will not see how most of it turns out. What I can promise, because I have watched it in others and been carried by it myself, is this: a human life can be whole inside an unrepaired world. Not comfortable. Not untroubled. Not spared. Whole. Present to what is actually happening and still capable of love and of action." -- Roshi Joan Halifax, Upaya Zen Center, Santa Fe, New Mexico

'Engaged Buddhism' -- Thich Nhat Hanh

and to all the good teachers who go forward in good faith and with good action ...

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September 2026

Faith Traditions Are Growing in Their Calls for Eco-Stewardship

"The World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation"

This day is bringing awareness and a call to action

The spiritual and secular find common ground here in a protection of The Commons

The Catholic Church observes September 1 as the "World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation", a day dedicated to thanking God for the gift of creation and renewing the Church’s commitment to ecological stewardship.

What the Day Is:

An annual Catholic observance established by Pope Francis in 2015 as a concrete follow‑up to Laudato Si’.

Shared with the Orthodox Church, which first designated September 1 as a creation‑focused "Day of Prayers for Natural Environment" in 1989.

The opening of the global "Season of Creation", which runs from September 1 to October 4 (Feast of St. Francis of Assisi).

Pope St. John Paul II in 1979

declared Francis the patron saint of ecology

Visit Pope Francis' Eco-Encyclical Laudato Si

More: https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php?title=File:St_Francis_with_the_birds.jpg

"Solemn Day of Prayers for Natural Environment", Orthodox Catholic, September 1

'Christianity is the largest religious group in the world...

The largest denominations -- Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox -- have an estimated 2.3 to 2.6 billion adherents

GreenPolicy360 / On Earth...

Religious traditions -- faith and spirituality as practiced -- have an intimate connection to life's protection, quality, and humanity's future

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Green values... a Blue-Green Living Earth... Onward we go...

Eco ... Ethics/Spirituality/Theology... Praxis & Politics

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecotheology
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiritual_ecology
• https://www.greenpolicy360.net/index.php/Category:Creation_Spirituality

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Religion and Climate Change: A Necessary Conversation

• http://religionnews.com/2017/02/19/scientists-ponder-how-to-talk-to-the-faithful-about-climate-change/

The relationship of theology to the modern ecological crisis became an intense issue of debate in Western academia in 1967, following the publication of the article, "The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis, " by Lynn White, Jr., Professor of History at the University of California at Los Angeles. In this work, White puts forward a theory that the Christian model of human dominion over nature has led to environmental devastation, providing a voice for "The Ecological Complaint".

Lynn White Jr.'s essay, "The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis," argues that the environmental crisis is primarily a result of the Western worldview shaped by Christianity, which promotes an anthropocentric view of nature. He suggests that this philosophical perspective has led to the exploitation of the environment, emphasizing the need for a new worldview to address ecological issues.

Some scholars argue that Christians actually helped bring about the current global environmental crisis by instructing followers that God, and by extension mankind, transcends nature. Much of the development of ecotheology as a theological discourse was in response to this argument, which has been called "The Ecological Complaint". Defendants of this perspective essentially claim that Christianity promotes the idea of human dominion over nature, treating nature itself as a tool to be used and even exploited for survival and prosperity. However, Christianity has often been viewed as the source of positive values towards the environment, and there are many voices within the Christian tradition whose vision embraces the well-being of the earth and all creatures...

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A vision of inter-connectedness and religion in the process of 'becoming'...

○ "We are all bound together in an inescapable web of the living ecosystem, and religion concerns how we knowingly bind ourselves to the larger whole which sustains all life." -- Rev. Dr. Russell L. Meyer, Florida Council of Churches

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It's All Related

Eco-ethics

Eco-Spirituality

New ways of seeing and understanding are sometimes expressed in colloquial terms such as "East meets West", "What goes around comes around", "Karma", "Waves of energy", "May the force be with you", and so on...

A key concept of eco-theology is of connections between things, an acknowledgement of living, changing systems of life, of a synergy and an entropy in nature, of a deeper eco-spirituality that humanity with its choices, science in its questioning, and philosophy in its search for truth continues, over generations, to advance.

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Pope Francis, the first Catholic pontiff to name himself after the Church's patron saint of the environment, St. Francis. The Jesuit pope has offered humanity a first Eco-Encyclical and doctrine ... Laudato Si'

• https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Pope_Francis_on_the_Environment

• https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Laudato_Si

Eco-theology

"On Care for Our Common Home"

St. Francis with the birds

"Protect, do not destroy the environment"

Pope Francis on the Environment

A first-ever Catholic Eco-Encyclical

 

 

The Challenge of Acting for the Commons

The Commons

Integral Ecology

Destroying the Environment Is a Sin

Tom Hayden-Green Politics...In Memory

Rights of Nature EarthLaw

 

Fear not the facts, the science

Trust in observing and studying and stewarding, the earth and creation calls you

An interview with Katharine Hayhoe

Via Christian Courier

Atmospheric scientist and evangelical Christian Katharine Hayhoe was named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People for her work studying climate change. She teaches in the Department of Political Science at Texas Tech University but her roots are Canadian: Hayhoe was born in Toronto and her father teaches at Tyndale University College and Seminary.

The Christian Courier Editor speaks with Hayhoe about the relationship between her faith and the “other” book of God – Science ....

 

Dr. Katharine Hayhoe is an evangelical Christian on a mission

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth, and the Earth was shapeless and barren, so God added light and water and land and sky and plants and animals and humans. If you extend this belief forward, then God also created coal and oil and gas, which we began burning to do our own creating, on a massive scale. Health and wealth flowered across the planet, but there were consequences: first for the poor and marginalized, who were more exposed to the pollution, and then for everyone, in the form of a changing climate that is endangering creation. Stretch the belief a bit further, and in 1972, God created Katharine Hayhoe, who would grow up to be both an evangelical Christian and a climate scientist. Join these identities together, and you get another of God’s creations: a prophet.

 

It's all related, it's all connected

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