Ecology of Vocation: Recasting Calling in a New Planetary Era by Kiara A. Jorgenson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Ecology of Vocation: Recasting Calling in a New Planetary Era by Kiara A. Jorgenson Marit Trelstad Ecology of Vocation: Recasting Calling in a New Planetary Era. By Kiara A. Jorgenson. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Press/Fortress Academic, 2020. 176 pp. In a time when major news channels report that we already are experiencing the results of climate change, can Christian ethics or theology offer insights or grounding to guide our response? Kiara Jorgenson's book is an excellent resource for understanding current scholarship in ecological ethics. Beyond this, she reframes a Christian understanding of vocation in order to add theological and ethical depth and urgency to our earthly calling in this era. She explains that "a dialogical approach to ecological ethics vis-à-vis the Protestant doctrine of vocation provides practical help for the North American church seeking to better fulfill its shared ecological calling" (2). This book attends to both the meta-ethical theories, helpfully coined by Jorgenson as "terrologies," and the importance of concretely contextual ethics. Challenging the short-sighted equation of vocation with work, Jorgenson seeks to retrieve and recast early Reformation ideas on vocation. For John Calvin and Martin Luther, in particular, vocation connects "… concepts of redemption, which center upon themes of kenotic relationship, reparation, and restoration. As a lynchpin doctrine, vocation, holding space between creation and redemption respectively, speaks less about doing the right thing or being the right thing and more about relating in a right or appropriate fashion" (127). In chapter one she recounts the main epistemologies and methods in current Christian environmental ethics. This chapter would be excellent reading for a course focused on ecological ethics as it provides a detailed and systematized review of many key scholars [End Page 242] and approaches. Jorgenson's second chapter works extensively with H. Richard Niebuhr's "germinal responsibilist framework" that connects ethics to epistemology and ontology (6). Chapter three dives into early Reformation history with Luther and Calvin's contextualized understandings of vocation. She retrieves two vital connections in their work on vocation: 1) the connection between individual and communal or corporate callings; 2) their linking of creation and redemption through the bridge concept of vocation or calling into the world. Chapter four continues this strand and recounts the history of Reformed and Lutheran theologians and how individualist and pietistic understandings of redemption, justification, and vocation led to the church's passivity on social and ecological issues of justice. Chapter five elucidates the work of three prominent ecological thinkers: Paul Santmire, Sallie McFague, and Wendell Berry. It outlines their methods, aims, concepts and contexts, with a focus on their insights on ecological interrelatedness, wisdom, and restraint. Chapter six offers additional insights on such matters as rest, joy, dignity, justice, and hope within particular individual and corporate/communal contexts. Deep interconnectivity, embraced so well by deep ecology, calls for a wider net of responsibility and awareness. Jorgenson's epilogue points to areas that she is committed to developing further, for example, the nature of work and how it is so easily coopted to support a capitalist system rather than the well-being of humans and the rest of creation (159). On other issues, she includes a brief two pages on eco-justice and environmental racism (52–53) and touches on this again in later chapters (for example, 150–151). Considering our times, it would have been helpful to develop these issues further even though one book cannot address every ethical context. I would have appreciated Jorgenson's further reflection on a deeply interrelational theological anthropology of human and divine relationship as well as human-creation relations. Jorgenson lifts up some theological models that reflect a one-way relation between God and humans where humans are "vessel(s) of God's work" (67) or simply recipients of Christ's gift and power (141). These could be further nuanced to align with the non-dualistic and deep interrelationality [End Page 243] lifted up across the book. The theological anthropology in process theology or Luther's "happy exchange," and works such as Elisabeth Gerle's Passionate Embrace: Luther on Love, Body and Sensual Presence (Cascade Books, 2017) may be constructive conversation partners due to their more dynamic understanding...