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Friday, August 25, 2023

Why I wrote Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology, Part II

 Environmentalism desperately needs an “I have a dream” moment, a planet-scale call of spiritual magnitude that inspires even people who feel complicit, or despairing, or just numb and uncaring, to create a better future. Enough of the yelling, enough of the revenge speak. 

And environmentalism needs to connect to anti-racism, to feminism, to anti-homophobia, anti-transphobia…

Conversely, religion needs to land on Earth and stop fueling Apocalyptic stories of the necessary destruction of Earth. 

And we are only too well aware of the all-out Christian-fueled assault on “woke” and LGBTQ people, fueled by a demonic sense of being the “goodies.” 

There is a profound relationship between what religion and environmentalism need. 

What if there was something about religion that was deeply environmental, ecological…biological? What if there was something about ecology that responded deeply to religious, or spiritual, or mystical feeling? 

This book finds a solution in a radical revaluation of Christianity. The point is to create a nonviolent army: vulnerable, blessed with a sense of irony, ambiguity, humor and beauty; to see the biosphere as a beautiful accident, driven by the sheer contingency of natural selection, sexual display and symbiosis. 

Ecological politics requires a language of mercy and forgiveness, and Christianity needs to remember mercy and forgiveness. 

The key to both? An all-out assault on the ultimate Satanic mill: the concept of master and slave, manifesting worldwide today in white supremacy and patriarchy. How humans treat each other is how they treat the biosphere. 


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