Beyond the Greening of Faith: Contemplative Practice in the Anthropocene

Abstract

Part of a special section on Creation Care, this essay argues that Christian responses to the ecological crisis ought to move beyond a conversation organized around the demands of prevailing environmental philosophies before which religious tradition seeks to justify itself, and towards a more dialogical, theoretically rigorous, heuristic, and contemplatively transformative exploration of the way Christian communities might deploy their spiritual and intellectual traditions in order to participate in the continuing effort to construct an integral ecological theory, practice, and politics. Drawing on the contemporary ecological criticism of writers such as Amitav Ghosh, Jan Zwicky, and Robert Bringhurst, the essay proposes that the Christian contemplative practice of reading the book of nature (theoria physike) provides a powerful example of what such Christian contemplative formation might look like in the Anthropocene.