Fertile Ground: Reflections on Christian Faith Practices as Care for the Earth
type: CreativeWork
description: As a young boy tromping through the woods of a Lutheran summer camp, I developed an almost innate conviction that Christianity held some correlate with ecological concern and action. Yet for most of my life almost all I heard concerning this destruction was silence. It seemed the environment, or at least environmental issues, lay beyond the pale of proper Christian concern. Even worse, the church and the environmental movement, which seem like natural allies, both held pejorative views of the other. For many people in my generation, the perceived apathy or hostility toward environmental issues on the part of the church started to strip away its relevancy to our time and lives. Unfortunately too often this has resulted in a tendency to throw the baby out with the bath water and turn instead solely to science, technology and secular philosophy for insights into an effective personal, political or cultural response. While the scale and urgency of the crisis certainly demands that we look to the best of our science, technology, and philosophy, our religious traditions too have much wisdom to offer our situation. This project is an attempt to explore and reclaim some of what may be useful and beneficial from our traditions as we seek how to live more sustainable and gentle lives today. As I was to discover, considerable ink has for years been devoted to scholarship on Christian theology and care for the Earth, its impact only now beginning to trickle beyond the academy. Far less attention has been paid on how to translate that “Christians ought to care” into the realm of daily life in a way that is at once faithful to our tradition and mindful of the Earth. In this thesis I tackle four of the many faith practices that can help with that translation: sharing a meal, Sabbath keeping, household economics and the ministry of reconciliation. The project utilizes a mix of personal reflection, biblical exegesis, contemporary scholarship, historical overview and narrative illust…
abstract: As a young boy tromping through the woods of a Lutheran summer camp, I developed an almost innate conviction that Christianity held some correlate with ecological concern and action. Yet for most of my life almost all I heard concerning this destruction was silence. It seemed the environment, or at least environmental issues, lay beyond the pale of proper Christian concern. Even worse, the church and the environmental movement, which seem like natural allies, both held pejorative views of the other. For many people in my generation, the perceived apathy or hostility toward environmental issues on the part of the church started to strip away its relevancy to our time and lives. Unfortunately too often this has resulted in a tendency to throw the baby out with the bath water and turn instead solely to science, technology and secular philosophy for insights into an effective personal, political or cultural response. While the scale and urgency of the crisis certainly demands that we look to the best of our science, technology, and philosophy, our religious traditions too have much wisdom to offer our situation. This project is an attempt to explore and reclaim some of what may be useful and beneficial from our traditions as we seek how to live more sustainable and gentle lives today. As I was to discover, considerable ink has for years been devoted to scholarship on Christian theology and care for the Earth, its impact only now beginning to trickle beyond the academy. Far less attention has been paid on how to translate that “Christians ought to care” into the realm of daily life in a way that is at once faithful to our tradition and mindful of the Earth. In this thesis I tackle four of the many faith practices that can help with that translation: sharing a meal, Sabbath keeping, household economics and the ministry of reconciliation. The project utilizes a mix of personal reflection, biblical exegesis, contemporary scholarship, historical overview and narrative illust…
author: Metcalf, Peter William
keywords: earthkeeping, environmental justice, environmental stewardship, jubilee, spirituality
date published: 2009-01-01T08:00:00Z
date modified: 2026-07-24T03:13:21Z
provider: Montana Technology
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Montana