Something very encouraging is happening at my church, the United Methodist Church of Northfield, Minnesota. A group of us have formed a church “Green Team” to focus on Christian stewardship of creation.

Another label we might have chosen for the group is “Creation Care Team.” In some ways I like that better, since it connects us more to our Christian roots. For some, the word “green” has negative political connotations.

We had mentioned forming a group such as this for a while, but then rather suddenly a few weeks ago, following an adult education forum on energy usage, we decided to meet informally during and/or following the church’s Wednesday night dinners. Many of us were already attending these dinners, and child care is provided, so the setting seemed to be a natural one. Thus we began to talk about environmental issues each week.

Last Sunday, the team made a group presentation at the Sunday education forum, each taking a few minutes to address a specific topic. One person made an impressive, well-substantiated presentation on “peak oil” - the concept that a peak in oil production has been or will soon be reached. Another, an engineer, spoke on his long-standing connection to energy research, including work on solar power and innovative window designs. He said the obstacles to making significant strides in energy conservation are political rather than technological or economic. Another engineer spoke of his work on our city’s energy task force and his use of a device to monitor real-time electricity usage in his home. Read the rest of this entry »

Note: The post below and headline above have been edited since the original publication to correct inaccuracies. The Declaration listed below was not a document approved by the Southern Baptist Convention, as I originally wrote. The inaccuracy was a result of my misreading of the New York Times article listed below. I apologize for this error.

A group of Southern Baptist leaders has issued a document entitled “A Southern Baptist Declaration on the Environment and Climate Change.” Signers of the new declaration include the current president of the Southern Baptist Convention, as well as two former presidents. The declaration was organized by the Southern Baptist Environment and Climate Initiative, which is distinct from the Southern Baptist Convention.

The group’s declaration differs strongly from a June 2007 Southern Baptist Convention resolution on global warming that is skeptical about whether global warming is caused by humans and whether significant reductions in carbon dioxide emissions are warranted. The smaller group’s declaration, in contrast, states, “current denominational engagement with these issues [has] often been too timid, failing to produce a unified moral voice. Our cautious response to these issues in the face of mounting evidence may be seen by the world as uncaring, reckless and ill-informed. We can do better.”

See a New York Times article on the new declaration and the Southern Baptist Convention press release written in response to it.

Yesterday was Laity Sunday at my church, the United Methodist Church of Northfield. Three of us - myself, Ron Griffith, and Rev. Mary Keen - were asked to prepare short talks that would take no more than five minutes to read - in effect, mini-sermons. Here is what I said:

I was asked to comment on the topic of my discipleship and the care for creation, and I want to relate that to our reading, the parable of the ten lepers (Luke 17: 11-20). I take several lessons from the parable: first, it is God who makes us well, but to be completely well, to receive all of God’s gifts, we must have faith; our faith makes us well. Second, God asks us to give thanks and praise for his gifts. Third, God heals and cares for all people, even the foreigner, the stranger, in this case the Samaritan. Here as always, Jesus is an example to us; we are asked to love and care for the alien, that strange other who is also our neighbor, though we often resist seeing him or her that way.

Now I relate this to our care for God’s creation in this way: We are to give thanks and praise for creation, to make our faith in God central to our lives, and to follow the example of Jesus as healer – healer not just of our immediate neighbors, not just the members of our nation, but the people of all nations.

Now I ask, are we acting as healers today in the way we live? In many ways we are not, I believe. And here I extend our notion of care for the stranger to our care for God’s creation, which sustains all of us. The food we eat, the air we breathe, the water we drink, these are part of creation. They sustain all of us, and to the extent that we endanger them, we endanger our neighbors; and when we care for them, we care for our neighbors. Read the rest of this entry »

This past year our family has been blessed to get to know a visiting scholar at St. Olaf College’s Kierkegaard Library, Prof. Gabriel Merigala of Madras Christian College, as well as his family. (In India he is known as Merigala Gabriel, or simply Gabriel; Indian naming conventions differ from Western ones.) We quickly felt a kinship with Gabriel, his wife Nirmala, and their children Susan and Samuel. That was due in part to my wife’s connections to India (her father was born there), their family’s participation in our church congregation at the United Methodist Church of Northfield, and the fact that we lived near each other.

Gabriel was one of a handful of scholars who reside here each year to study in the Kierkegaard Library, which houses a world-renowned collection of works by and about the Danish theologian and philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. (The library is officially known as the Howard V. and Edna H. Hong Kierkegaard Library. The Hongs both taught at St. Olaf and translated Kierkegaard’s works into English.)

During his visit, Gabriel was in demand as a speaker, and I was fortunate to hear him speak forcefully and eloquently on Kierkegaard and Gandhi. I also enjoyed getting to learn more about his scholarship when I edited the book that he is working on, Subjectivity and Religious Truth in the Philosophy of Soren Kierkegaard, which has been accepted for publication by Mercer University Press.

As I read Gabriel’s book I learned a great deal about Kierkegaard, about whom I knew only a little before. I came away with a deeper understanding of Kierkegaard’s concept of the “leap of faith” and his role in the history of philosophy and theology. Faith, according to Kierkegaard, can’t be a product of reason. We can’t use reason to prove the existence of God, for example, or prove that Jesus was both human and divine. Instead we must accept these on the basis of faith alone. Faith exists in the realm of the “absurd” and the paradoxical rather than that of reason, and we must simply believe.

We give thanks for all that we have received from Gabriel and his family and we wish them the blessings and peace of Jesus Christ as they journey home and resume life in India. And we hope to one day meet with them again, whether here or abroad.

I’m not sure how the subject of death came up for our three-year old daughter. Perhaps it was in trying to explain to her what Easter was and how Jesus died and was resurrected. Perhaps it was explaining that a relative had died and was no longer with us. Whatever the cause, our daughter has been asking questions such as, “Daddy, when will you die?,” and “Daddy, will you die?”

Of course such questions give one pause. But strangely enough, I don’t mind hearing them. I’d rather live with full consciousness of my mortality and full appreciation of the gift of life. I’d rather pause and consider my own end, then resume life with thanks and praise.

I haven’t written much about my own faith in this blog. In part that comes from me being respectful of the diversity of readers out there, but it also arises from my own lack of experience and uncomfortability in speaking about my faith and an awkwardness in doing so in our multicultural, largely secular culture. To speak about Christianity is to broach a fraught subject; it also means using a discourse that has often been misused, one that many people cannot listen to without hearing chords of self-righteous judgment and even bigotry. Read the rest of this entry »

I wanted to share the quote below from my pastor, Clay Oglesbee. It’s from his blog, Soul to Sole:

Humility is a matter of claiming in our own current awareness that which we have done or said and lived to regret, as well as that which, wisely anticipated, we do not wish to experience in the future.

“Environmentalists have embarked on a secular crusade,” reads the headline for Katherine Kersten’s column in the StarTribune yesterday. The conservative columnist argues that Christians should beware of turning environmentalism into a “secular religion” and quotes a Prof. Robert H. Nelson, who criticizes the “environmental gospel” as “Calvinism minus God.” She goes on to say that this “gospel” appeals to people who are “turning away from traditional religion”: Read the rest of this entry »

Over the weekend I saw some old friends I hadn’t seen in a long time.

One was a friend from my freshman year of college, when I attended the University of Chicago (I subsequently transferred to the University of Minnesota). He was in town for a job interview and earlier had located me via the Internet and this blog. We hadn’t talked in more than 20 years! My family and I went up to St. Paul and met with him on Saturday. It was wonderful to catch up and find that we had more in common than ever, including marriage and children within the last five years. Read the rest of this entry »

This quote from the Bible caught my eye for what it says about winter - a season that is fast approaching. It concerns what makes a “capable wife.” Let’s de-gender that and consider the “She” below to be any “capable person”:

She is not afraid for her household when it snows,
for all her household are clothed in crimson.

Proverbs 31: 21