Tom kicked things off in the morning by giving a tour de force speech about the challenge we face in defining ourselves and our humanity in relation to environmental degradation and global climate change. \u201cWho do you think you are?\u201d was the question he posed, challenging us to find less arrogant, less individualistic, and less selfish understandings of our place in the universe. How we understand the story of the cosmos is crucial, he argued, to how we develop an ethical framework that motivates our behavior. Our ethical framework, he argued, then facilitates the emergence of our spiritual practices. It follows that our cosmology matters since it goes a long way in shaping our self-understanding and our understanding of our responsibility to the world. Be careful, he was saying, about what credence you give to stories because they shape your ethics.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n It was clear within the first hour that there are differences of opinion about spiritual and religious matters among our group, a group that includes Christians, Unitarians, a Daoist, a Methodist, and others who don\u2019t define themselves by sect or congregation but by general spirituality. However, there is a common thread that brings us together: we are determined to cultivate a more profound understanding of the natural world as well as the dimensions of spirituality, and to strengthen our ethical commitments to preserving, restoring, and sustaining the natural world. Some disagreements arose around the question of whether or not the Judeo-Christian tradition\u2014particularly its story of the world\u2019s beginnings\u2014 is adequate to respond to the crises we face. We had read Lynn White\u2019s famous 1967 essay, \u201cThe Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,\u201d in which White argues that what he believes to be Christianity\u2019s mistaken wholesale rejection of pagan animism\u2014its conclusion that the world is for humans alone and is merely dead matter\u2014 led it to become a worldview that has inspired exploitative attitudes toward the environment. Since White believed that environmental degradation was essentially a problem caused by religion, he nevertheless argued that needed either a new religion or to rethink the old ones in order to produce a worldview and a cosmology that grant greater subjectivity and holiness to the physical world. There is no concensus about the validity of White\u2019s thesis, however, but it did spawn a massive response among religious thought leaders, creating the field we know today of ecotheology. One participant suggested that her attention to the Christian tradition has taught her to tread more lightly on the earth and that it is our mentality more than our beliefs that matter. But we didn\u2019t come to any conclusions about why many Christians are indifferent or even hostile to environmental stewardship. Tom invoked the theologian Thomas Berry\u2019s claim that the Genesis account was in need of an update, that we needed a cosmology that was more responsive and relevant to the crises we face today.<\/p>\n I agree that we need a worldview that is more open to science, but for me it doesn\u2019t seem to me necessary to conclude that in order to become more responsive to the earth\u2019s needs we need an entirely different cosmology. Besides, I don\u2019t see how humanity is ever going to come to agreement on the true story of the earth\u2019s and humanity\u2019s beginnings, so when it comes to the goal of better collective environmental ethics, I would prefer not to argue over which one is right. Perhaps we could simply state that every religion or philosophy needs to be mined for its ecological wisdom. How we read and interpret stories of our origins\u2014whether they come from science or organized religion\u2014is more important than the particular content of those stories. Tom believes the Judeo-Christian story is simply too anthropocentric, too focused on individual salvation and a relationship to a personal God to be effective in producing the kind of ethics we need today. This was a tough challenge to my own view, but I respected where Tom was coming from. He was not interested in showing disrespect for Christianity but was merely calling for greater commitment to selfless service on behalf of the entire human family and the entire more-than-human community of which we are a part.<\/p>\n I certainly am on board with that goal, but I come at it from a perspective that is animated by the Christian response to environmental degradation and by my own Mormon beliefs<\/a>. After spending last semester reading The Seven Pillars of Creation: The Bible, Science, and the Ecology of Wonder<\/em> by William Brown with a great variety of faculty across campus at BYU last semester, we were at least convinced of Brown\u2019s fundamental thesis: the Bible can handle the challenges of science. We need not conclude it is irreconcilable with what we now know about evolution, chaos theory, climate change, or species extinction. We need merely to read with greater urgency, adapting the stories to our current understandings to see what kind of fruit they bear. Of course, this implies that we should do more than read scripture. We should be literate in science, curious about philosophy, and eager to understand our current world as well as we can. We should recognize that God\u2019s word and wisdom can be found in all disciplines and cultures and that if we are serious in our devotion to the truth, we should be eager to welcome it from wherever it comes. That, at least, seems consistent with what I understand Mormonism to be. Why we don\u2019t always practice learning with such universal thirst is, of course, a key question. Why can\u2019t we simultaneously believe in what we hold to be true and believe that there is much we have yet to understand?<\/p>\n I am honored to have the chance to wrestle with these questions, with people of good will with whom I share many common values, especially a commitment to care for the earth and all living things. No one in the workshop seems to think it is necessary for us to agree on these theological questions to be able to work together to improve the environmental conditions of life, but we have learned the value already of offering tough and valuable questions to one another to aid us in our quest to be more environmentally aware, more spiritually sensitive, and more committed to promoting environmental health. One participant concluded our discussion wisely that what matters is that we \u201cbe here now,\u201d that whatever our beliefs, we don\u2019t allow the past or the future to become more important than our responsibilities to the sufferings, injustices, and degradation of the present.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/229\/2012\/08\/IMG_0528-300x225.jpg\" "\\"IMG_0528\\"")
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