Practical Earthkeeping: Hospitality Toward Nature
For the Ecological Disciple. Noah Guthrie reflects on Amazonian folklore and hospitality from strangers during his recent stay in Peru.
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For the Ecological Disciple. Noah Guthrie reflects on Amazonian folklore and hospitality from strangers during his recent stay in Peru.
From Sojouners, by Liuan Huska. “The harvest is ripe. More and more Christians from across the theological spectrum want their faith communities to do something about our environmental crises….”
Published by Waynesburg University. Students attended the marine service trip of a lifetime during their 2024-25 winter break at A Rocha USA. The group was led through the wonders of Florida’s ecosystems by Dr. Christian Hayes and Dr. Tracy Dohn-Cummins, working in conjunction with A Rocha USA to learn about southern marine life’s environmental challenges and actively serve local communities.
Published by the Rabbit Room. “Our tuxedo cat, Gretl, has many quirks. She still suckles her fur at the age of seven, stretches herself across the stairs right as you go down, and casually walks away from you after meowing for attention. She also enjoys Christmas hymns. When the winter holidays come and my family sings around a wreath of pink and purple Advent candles, Gretl will often pad toward us to listen. She’ll flick her black, white-tipped tail as though it were a needle weaving our voices together…”
By Ecologist Rick Lindroth, for Biologos. “Nature connection is fundamentally important for our spiritual health. Rick writes, “what the Christian community has largely failed to realize is that in distancing ourselves from nature, we are distancing ourselves from God…”
By Noah Guthrie, in the Ecological Disciple.
“It was the fall of 2018, and I was one of a dozen interns working at the Brooksdale Environmental Centre. With a reedy wetland, a curling belt of Douglas firs, and a mini village of white-walled, brown-beamed homes, Brooksdale is A Rocha Canada’s base of operations in British Columbia…”
By Liuan Huska, for Biologos. Churches can help children return to their rightful place in the natural world, healing a growing rift…
By Noah Guthrie, in the Ecological Disciple.
“Working in a prison lot, I heaved shovelfuls of shells from a sprawling oyster boneyard. Each shell was roughly the shape of an ear – one side a coarse dome, the other a pearly, bruised teardrop – and there were thousands piled together, forming hills higher than my head…”
By Tish Harrison Warren, in the New York Times Opinion’s Giving Guide, 2022.
“Christians understand Isaiah’s prophecies as culminating in Jesus’ return, and that this vision of a restored heaven and Earth is the ultimate destiny of the universe. Still, some Christian traditions, particularly white evangelicalism, emphasize a more individualistic view of God’s work of redemption. In the evangelical church I grew up in, salvation was primarily seen as an internal, spiritual experience — getting “saved” or being “born again” — so that we could go to heaven when we die. In the readings of Advent, however, Isaiah shows how incomplete this view is. God’s intention, Isaiah seems to say, is not evacuation from Earth to some far away afterlife but the healing and restoration of all things, even the material world of oak trees and orangutans, jellyfish and jalapeños, mountain laurels and desert willows.”