I have started writing a blog post on being a pragmatist vs. activist vs. slacktivist....and that blog is coming....but sometimes synchronicity wins out. If the head of the Environmental Protection Agency is getting a short audience with the Pope on the moral issue of climate....well we can all take a second to think this whole thing through.
Most Sundays I volunteer at my Catholic church here in LA as a small group leader with teens. A recent session was about science and faith, and I was telling my co-leader how excited I was to discuss environment/eco/climate change with the small group since I experience resistance all the time....particularly from conservative Christians on that topic. The words are hanging in the air, and I see a WashPost article on a study that showed half of Americans think the increasing severity of natural disasters is a sign of Biblical end times (77% of White Evangelicals and 74% of Black Protestants). Oh, where to begin...
I'm inspired that I'm nowhere near the first person to draw the connection between being a Christian and stewarding the environment (aka God's creation for all my non-religious peeps). Leading climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe from the Years of Living Dangerously first episode (watch for free!) draws from her evangelical Christianity when speaking with others about climate change and faith:
"When I look at the information we get from the planet, I look at it as God's creation, speaking to us. And in this case, there's no question that God's creation is telling us that it is running a fever."
Sit with that a second. That right there's the bomb diggity of explanations.
Until the Pope Francis encyclical on ecology comes out, you'll have to survive with my opinions! (Ok, well I'm basing it on off-the-cuff remarks he gave on the topic...but I digress...)
There's two reasons the mentality that is so prevalent in evangelical Christians is a huge problem....
1) it's a gigantic loophole and out for people who are causing climate change (Americans) to not deal with the issue (which I won't go into this blog post, but is important to note!), and
2) more importantly, it's antithetical to what being a Christian is all about, caring about the poor and social/environmental justice is at the heart of the Gospel....
Most Sundays I volunteer at my Catholic church here in LA as a small group leader with teens. A recent session was about science and faith, and I was telling my co-leader how excited I was to discuss environment/eco/climate change with the small group since I experience resistance all the time....particularly from conservative Christians on that topic. The words are hanging in the air, and I see a WashPost article on a study that showed half of Americans think the increasing severity of natural disasters is a sign of Biblical end times (77% of White Evangelicals and 74% of Black Protestants). Oh, where to begin...
I'm inspired that I'm nowhere near the first person to draw the connection between being a Christian and stewarding the environment (aka God's creation for all my non-religious peeps). Leading climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe from the Years of Living Dangerously first episode (watch for free!) draws from her evangelical Christianity when speaking with others about climate change and faith:
"When I look at the information we get from the planet, I look at it as God's creation, speaking to us. And in this case, there's no question that God's creation is telling us that it is running a fever."
Sit with that a second. That right there's the bomb diggity of explanations.
Until the Pope Francis encyclical on ecology comes out, you'll have to survive with my opinions! (Ok, well I'm basing it on off-the-cuff remarks he gave on the topic...but I digress...)
There's two reasons the mentality that is so prevalent in evangelical Christians is a huge problem....
1) it's a gigantic loophole and out for people who are causing climate change (Americans) to not deal with the issue (which I won't go into this blog post, but is important to note!), and
2) more importantly, it's antithetical to what being a Christian is all about, caring about the poor and social/environmental justice is at the heart of the Gospel....
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