Yay!!! Thank you for posting this Paul. I’ve been looking forward to it ever since you announced it and I was SO bummed I couldn’t go in person. Can’t wait to give it a listen!!! 🙏 Happy New Year!
I feel as a former 'Green' Eco Activist, a member of Permaculture and a forager of 'wild' plant remedies and a Christian- Answer is No! I think Nature is Gods Creation and deeply flawed Man/Woman is destroying Nature in an attempt to dominate. Its a Mind that is God-less and Not humbled. We are at best, Stewards of Gods Creation x x
I'm sorry to say that the Substack AI thingy can provide you with one if you ask. I don't have a good written one, as a good bit of the talk was a bit extemporised.
The transcript is available, under the title of the post and to the right. I loved this talk so much I was going to volunteer to edit the transcript, but it is frighteningly good as is!
Thanks for sharing. Look forward to listening to it; hopefully while doing a little work in our garden. :)
I wrote a piece a few years ago on a similar theme (I actually quote Paul in it) about how we won't solve our drought problems in the Western US without religion and prayer.
This was beautifully thought out, written and delivered, full of truth and marvelous redirection for those who have the ears to hear. I know you weary of praise and do not create such loveliness for such, so I will only say glory to God and hallowed be His name. May God grant you many years and many opportunities to shine His glorious Light upon our darkened world.
Its thought provoking. Jesus had complete control over nature when He was here. I think about the story of the nets being overloaded with fish, the fig tree being cursed, water into wine etc.. God flooding the Earth, destroying cities with fire, all of the animal sacrifices. It doesnt seem that "nature" was considered a monolith that couldnt be changed or was sacred. Jesus could and did operate outside the laws of physics. We have to contend with it and if we want to eat and stay alive then we have to take from it. That doesn't mean we should dump toxic waste into rivers and cut down every tree. Alot of the destruction of nature is because of greed plain and simple. I look forward to when the meek shall inherit the Earth, an Earth that has been remade.
“Alot of the destruction of nature is because of greed plain and simple. I look forward to when the meek shall inherit the Earth, an Earth that has been remade.”
I agree that much of the destruction is ‘greed’ - but not only of the ‘billionaire technopolist’ or ConAgro variety that typically springs to mind at such a phrase. (Fyi - My argument below is not directed AT you but arises in reaction because it sparked these thoughts.)
I think that the vast majority of us participate in the ‘greed’ via unconscious overconsumption or a greed for convenience and luxury. We (esp in the modern West) who have grown up in relative ‘luxury’ & comfort that kings of old couldn’t have conceived of, can’t necessarily absolve ourselves with thoughts that we’re somehow outside the system because we’re just trying to muddle through and that I am no captain of industry. (Again - not saying you are implicitly saying that - just that I have had that thought myself.)
Too often I see any criticism or argumentation of the type Paul is making here regarding a return to responsibility via spiritual practice dismissed with a wave of the hand by Christians who think we have no responsibility to care for and steward the creation we’re gifted with - because in the end ‘God will recreate it’ so things of ‘this world’ don’t matter. If not for the sake of nature itself - we owe it to one another to not just not pollute it and destroy it for others - but to try to pull back from consumption that drives it.
"He who does not love trees, does not love Christ"
"Do you know that God gave us one more commandment, which is not recorded in Scripture? It is the commandment, 'Love the trees.' When you plant a tree, you plant hope, you plant peace, you plant love, and you will receive God’s blessing.”
Wonderful talk, I enjoyed it very much, listening to it on a cold Irish January day.
Ivan Illich said much the same thing, 'the corruption of the best is the worse', I think what he meant by that was the Western Church was the proto State/corporation, all the elements spun off from it have ended up in this technopoly nightmare. What a pity that Celtic Christianity which had a much more embodied and situational tradition got quashed.
Paul - I have listened through it twice now and I am awed by your ability to collate and so cogently & articulately express these thoughts. I especially appreciate your encouragement of those of us Western Christians (Roman Catholic myself) to look back to ‘our own’ examples and didn’t harp on Eastern Orthodoxy as the only or ‘right’ solution. I believe in time - arguments of who split from who, or who is right re the schism - should fall to the side and humility before God & one another should allow us to reconverge in love & care for one another - AND act as true stewards of creation and God’s family of mankind. Not that theological truth is unimportant - but - I believe it to be less important than working together with humility & learning from one another. The Western scientific & technical mind has brought tremendous good for the world - while simultaneously setting up much havoc & destruction. Finding the balance point may never be achieved but is I believe what the aim should be. I feel like we have a tendency to resist course correction when the downside of any ‘advancement’ comes to light and the vested powers that be want to double down instead. We in the West need humility in these scenarios. Thanks for your wonderful talk. 🙏
Well said, Charles. And I agree this was a wonderful talk, and especially for my understanding the distinction made between east and west is quite helpful. I am not a Christian, and yet the legacy of sin as moral evil is I think the biggest challenge we must overcome if we are ever to find the path back to sacramental creation. That said, it’s difficult not to be angry about this world and worldview we’ve inherited. And so our minds debase toward punishment, perhaps aligning ourselves with a wrathful God and woeful means, or maybe just something simpler, a shift in authority. But when we think in terms or right and wrong, and likewise true or untrue, we regress to the posture of comparison. This talk offered a much needed alternative to the civic model of discipline and punish that’s been handed down. No one likes being told what to do, and yet too often we cannot sidestep the wish to correct one another, to shame and shun. The pattern is unrelenting, and it never works out. Plants and animals grow and thrive without instruction manuals, why do we have so many? Reading this blog for the past 2-3 years I have been at times put off by a tone of judgment and rigidity. I suppose this is the nature of argument and the writer’s claim. Our friend Paul has to pay the bills! But I’m grateful much of that stickiness has since receded, replaced with a greater humility, and the grace of a peaceful heart. This is our destination: calm, ease, unity. All in all. In order to protect the organism that is the earth and the breath of God which enlivens it, the task is not mere stewardship. This planet is our essence and without it we die. Indeed essence revealed is knowing that to be alive is a miracle.
If anyone found the "God everywhere" talk pantheistic, I've found the term "panentheism" helpful. Pantheism is "God is everything", but panentheism is "God is *in* everything."
Verifying the humanity of people attempting to access sites has been going on for a long time. Many used to say "Please verify that you are a human and not a robot." This is mainly a precaution against bots getting access to the comboxes or to the network in question. These verifications even appear on some of my work-related sites on my work computer.
Well, yes -- angry that we've gotten to a place where websites have to screen for malicious bots. One of those things that comes with the territory, alas.
A while ago, I started noticing the Greek root "pan". It turned up recently in pan-demie/pandemic, for example. I learned two days ago that the term "epidemie" refers to something that is LOCALIZED within borders, for example, like a walled garden ? But the Greek root "pan" is an open reference to the (colonizing) universal, which goes beyond all borders.
When you think about it, the word "everything", by mushing things up together like what a trash compacter does, is very impoverishing. It does not help us pay attention to detail, be observant. It encourages generalization, for example. An indifferentiated and indifferent world ?
One of the things that I have discovered in my own search for meaning is that the West has been very active in promoting universal visions of human experience. Christianity is one example of a universal vision of human experience, but it is not alone, within the West. Our current evangelism for ecology is also an example of a belief system with universal aspirations. "Universal" is a Latin word, and "Pan"... is a Greek root...
My vocation, as I see it, (and there are other aspects), is to get right with God and make right the place I inhabit. Once we leave the farther we should get our hands dirty restoring our watershed.
A good talk, Paul, and I listened all the way through it with my eyes closed, which was soothing.
The Genesis story predates Christianity. It is part of the Jewish sacred texts, and I feel that it is important to not lose sight of this. Did Man's confusion arising from the ambiguous nature of the words Eve heard from what ? whom ? set the whole creation askew, and lead to a world where the animals killed other animals in order to eat (predation) ? I don't know.
I think that death and killing are distasteful to us, and we would do anything now to sweep them under the carpet, whether done by the other animals, or us. Killing is a little more palatable to us when it is done by the other animals, but... just a little. It offends our sensibility. We are squeamish about it. It has become unnatural to us, in general.
It seems logical to me that walled gardens could be seen as paradise in the ancient world, and even now. Putting walls around gardens keeps some things in, and other things out, and is a form of protection at best. It also has its disadvantages, of course.
On the driving force of the West, I still like to think that the Greco-Roman heritage, language, through the very systematic nature of Latin, has been a decisive force. Latin's power to systematize, thus, organize experience, was probably a big factor in the rise of the Roman Catholic Church, and in our modern science. And Latin was around before Christianity, for sure. Greek, too.
There seems to be something in us ? around us ? that makes us suffer from being conscious, aware, thinking, feeling beings, as though "it" would be better for us to not suffer as a result of being alive, and that we would/will be healed when we no longer suffer.
Conscious of what ? of... self ? of ourselves as separate beings, separate from creation, unlike the trees, or animals that we perceive as not sharing our suffering ?
The power that we have over the natural world has not made an end to the suffering that comes from our being simply conscious, and conscious that we are thinking, feeling beings, which divides us from inside. And our control and mastery over nature does not include the nature that is written into our very bodies in places that we cannot see, or maybe even imagine.
Is our Christian faith supposed to wipe a slate clean, and erase our consciousness of self, in order to ease the suffering that comes from it ? I'm not sure at all.
Thanks for the fine talk, Paul. I was particularly interested in your references to Hermann Daly. Can you recall which book of his you were referring to?
The very first thing that I ever read by Wendell Berry is his essay 'Christianity and the Survival of Creation,' which had been reprinted in a now-defunct Orthodox quarterly called "Epiphany Journal." I don't remember exactly when this would have been, but I'm thinking mid-90's. In any case, I was bowled over by the piece, which covers somewhat similar territory to your talk, and immediately bought the Berry book in which the essay originally appeared, "Sex, Economy, Freedom & Commmunity." Although it comes from a different perspective (Berry, as you know, is an American of Baptist background), it's a great companion-piece to your talk. Can't remember if it appeared in "The World-Ending Fire" but I'm thinking not (don't have my copy handy to check).
Oddly enough, the first time as a Christian that I heard anything on this subject was way back in the late 70's when I read a little book by the Evangelical theologian/philosopher Francis Schaeffer called "Pollution and the Death of Man." Schaeffer, I think, was making an appeal to his fellow Evangelicals that their attitude towards Creation was important and that ecological concerns shouldn't be dismissed by Christians. I recall thinking at the time that it was something of a brave book in that in those days "ecology" was widely seen by American Christians as a "leftist" thing and therefore suspect. My copy of that book is long gone, but I should get one and reread it to see what my thoughts are 45 years later.
(Edit: just had a look online and saw that Schaeffer's book was reprinted in 2022 with a new afterword by the editor and two appendices by sociologist Richard Means, one of which deals with Lynn White's essay.)
Yay!!! Thank you for posting this Paul. I’ve been looking forward to it ever since you announced it and I was SO bummed I couldn’t go in person. Can’t wait to give it a listen!!! 🙏 Happy New Year!
I feel as a former 'Green' Eco Activist, a member of Permaculture and a forager of 'wild' plant remedies and a Christian- Answer is No! I think Nature is Gods Creation and deeply flawed Man/Woman is destroying Nature in an attempt to dominate. Its a Mind that is God-less and Not humbled. We are at best, Stewards of Gods Creation x x
You might enjoy the talk, then!
Any chance of a text? Deaf people like me tend to prefer it! If not I'll fire up the gramophone :)
I'm sorry to say that the Substack AI thingy can provide you with one if you ask. I don't have a good written one, as a good bit of the talk was a bit extemporised.
The transcript is available, under the title of the post and to the right. I loved this talk so much I was going to volunteer to edit the transcript, but it is frighteningly good as is!
Soon the thing will be able to talk too, and then I'm down the dole office!
Thanks for sharing. Look forward to listening to it; hopefully while doing a little work in our garden. :)
I wrote a piece a few years ago on a similar theme (I actually quote Paul in it) about how we won't solve our drought problems in the Western US without religion and prayer.
https://www.deseret.com/2023/3/1/23611106/drought-water-west-utah-prayer-faith-spencer-cox/
Lovely piece. I think there are parallels with energy production, we need to reembed our energy production and consumption back into our societies.
Excellent. Absolutely excellent. Thank you.
This was beautifully thought out, written and delivered, full of truth and marvelous redirection for those who have the ears to hear. I know you weary of praise and do not create such loveliness for such, so I will only say glory to God and hallowed be His name. May God grant you many years and many opportunities to shine His glorious Light upon our darkened world.
Its thought provoking. Jesus had complete control over nature when He was here. I think about the story of the nets being overloaded with fish, the fig tree being cursed, water into wine etc.. God flooding the Earth, destroying cities with fire, all of the animal sacrifices. It doesnt seem that "nature" was considered a monolith that couldnt be changed or was sacred. Jesus could and did operate outside the laws of physics. We have to contend with it and if we want to eat and stay alive then we have to take from it. That doesn't mean we should dump toxic waste into rivers and cut down every tree. Alot of the destruction of nature is because of greed plain and simple. I look forward to when the meek shall inherit the Earth, an Earth that has been remade.
“Alot of the destruction of nature is because of greed plain and simple. I look forward to when the meek shall inherit the Earth, an Earth that has been remade.”
I agree that much of the destruction is ‘greed’ - but not only of the ‘billionaire technopolist’ or ConAgro variety that typically springs to mind at such a phrase. (Fyi - My argument below is not directed AT you but arises in reaction because it sparked these thoughts.)
I think that the vast majority of us participate in the ‘greed’ via unconscious overconsumption or a greed for convenience and luxury. We (esp in the modern West) who have grown up in relative ‘luxury’ & comfort that kings of old couldn’t have conceived of, can’t necessarily absolve ourselves with thoughts that we’re somehow outside the system because we’re just trying to muddle through and that I am no captain of industry. (Again - not saying you are implicitly saying that - just that I have had that thought myself.)
Too often I see any criticism or argumentation of the type Paul is making here regarding a return to responsibility via spiritual practice dismissed with a wave of the hand by Christians who think we have no responsibility to care for and steward the creation we’re gifted with - because in the end ‘God will recreate it’ so things of ‘this world’ don’t matter. If not for the sake of nature itself - we owe it to one another to not just not pollute it and destroy it for others - but to try to pull back from consumption that drives it.
Fr. Michael Butler and I cowrote this for the Acton Institute on a related theme: https://shop.acton.org/products/creation-and-the-heart-of-man-an-orthodox-christian-perspective-on-environmentalism
It might interest you and readers.
"He who does not love trees, does not love Christ"
"Do you know that God gave us one more commandment, which is not recorded in Scripture? It is the commandment, 'Love the trees.' When you plant a tree, you plant hope, you plant peace, you plant love, and you will receive God’s blessing.”
- Elder Amphilochios of Patmos
Beautiful!
Wonderful talk, I enjoyed it very much, listening to it on a cold Irish January day.
Ivan Illich said much the same thing, 'the corruption of the best is the worse', I think what he meant by that was the Western Church was the proto State/corporation, all the elements spun off from it have ended up in this technopoly nightmare. What a pity that Celtic Christianity which had a much more embodied and situational tradition got quashed.
Paul - I have listened through it twice now and I am awed by your ability to collate and so cogently & articulately express these thoughts. I especially appreciate your encouragement of those of us Western Christians (Roman Catholic myself) to look back to ‘our own’ examples and didn’t harp on Eastern Orthodoxy as the only or ‘right’ solution. I believe in time - arguments of who split from who, or who is right re the schism - should fall to the side and humility before God & one another should allow us to reconverge in love & care for one another - AND act as true stewards of creation and God’s family of mankind. Not that theological truth is unimportant - but - I believe it to be less important than working together with humility & learning from one another. The Western scientific & technical mind has brought tremendous good for the world - while simultaneously setting up much havoc & destruction. Finding the balance point may never be achieved but is I believe what the aim should be. I feel like we have a tendency to resist course correction when the downside of any ‘advancement’ comes to light and the vested powers that be want to double down instead. We in the West need humility in these scenarios. Thanks for your wonderful talk. 🙏
Well said, Charles. And I agree this was a wonderful talk, and especially for my understanding the distinction made between east and west is quite helpful. I am not a Christian, and yet the legacy of sin as moral evil is I think the biggest challenge we must overcome if we are ever to find the path back to sacramental creation. That said, it’s difficult not to be angry about this world and worldview we’ve inherited. And so our minds debase toward punishment, perhaps aligning ourselves with a wrathful God and woeful means, or maybe just something simpler, a shift in authority. But when we think in terms or right and wrong, and likewise true or untrue, we regress to the posture of comparison. This talk offered a much needed alternative to the civic model of discipline and punish that’s been handed down. No one likes being told what to do, and yet too often we cannot sidestep the wish to correct one another, to shame and shun. The pattern is unrelenting, and it never works out. Plants and animals grow and thrive without instruction manuals, why do we have so many? Reading this blog for the past 2-3 years I have been at times put off by a tone of judgment and rigidity. I suppose this is the nature of argument and the writer’s claim. Our friend Paul has to pay the bills! But I’m grateful much of that stickiness has since receded, replaced with a greater humility, and the grace of a peaceful heart. This is our destination: calm, ease, unity. All in all. In order to protect the organism that is the earth and the breath of God which enlivens it, the task is not mere stewardship. This planet is our essence and without it we die. Indeed essence revealed is knowing that to be alive is a miracle.
Well said! 👏🙏
If anyone found the "God everywhere" talk pantheistic, I've found the term "panentheism" helpful. Pantheism is "God is everything", but panentheism is "God is *in* everything."
Thanks for sharing the talk!
An important distinction! Kallistos Ware is very good on this: https://incommunion.org/2004/12/11/through-creation-to-the-creator/
I got a message saying that "incommunion" had to verify that I was a human being in order to continue.
This kind of message gives me the heebee geebees, however you spell this...
I pulled out before they could verify me...
That may just be superstitious on my part, but it's hard to know what to do in the Machine Age, with the machine connections.
It seems more and more like that machine wants to connect and unite us way beyond what we can even imagine. Creepy.
Verifying the humanity of people attempting to access sites has been going on for a long time. Many used to say "Please verify that you are a human and not a robot." This is mainly a precaution against bots getting access to the comboxes or to the network in question. These verifications even appear on some of my work-related sites on my work computer.
Nothing to worry about.
I'm not really sure how much I'm worried. Am I supposed to be worried ? Maybe... angry.
Well, yes -- angry that we've gotten to a place where websites have to screen for malicious bots. One of those things that comes with the territory, alas.
A while ago, I started noticing the Greek root "pan". It turned up recently in pan-demie/pandemic, for example. I learned two days ago that the term "epidemie" refers to something that is LOCALIZED within borders, for example, like a walled garden ? But the Greek root "pan" is an open reference to the (colonizing) universal, which goes beyond all borders.
When you think about it, the word "everything", by mushing things up together like what a trash compacter does, is very impoverishing. It does not help us pay attention to detail, be observant. It encourages generalization, for example. An indifferentiated and indifferent world ?
One of the things that I have discovered in my own search for meaning is that the West has been very active in promoting universal visions of human experience. Christianity is one example of a universal vision of human experience, but it is not alone, within the West. Our current evangelism for ecology is also an example of a belief system with universal aspirations. "Universal" is a Latin word, and "Pan"... is a Greek root...
My vocation, as I see it, (and there are other aspects), is to get right with God and make right the place I inhabit. Once we leave the farther we should get our hands dirty restoring our watershed.
A good talk, Paul, and I listened all the way through it with my eyes closed, which was soothing.
The Genesis story predates Christianity. It is part of the Jewish sacred texts, and I feel that it is important to not lose sight of this. Did Man's confusion arising from the ambiguous nature of the words Eve heard from what ? whom ? set the whole creation askew, and lead to a world where the animals killed other animals in order to eat (predation) ? I don't know.
I think that death and killing are distasteful to us, and we would do anything now to sweep them under the carpet, whether done by the other animals, or us. Killing is a little more palatable to us when it is done by the other animals, but... just a little. It offends our sensibility. We are squeamish about it. It has become unnatural to us, in general.
It seems logical to me that walled gardens could be seen as paradise in the ancient world, and even now. Putting walls around gardens keeps some things in, and other things out, and is a form of protection at best. It also has its disadvantages, of course.
On the driving force of the West, I still like to think that the Greco-Roman heritage, language, through the very systematic nature of Latin, has been a decisive force. Latin's power to systematize, thus, organize experience, was probably a big factor in the rise of the Roman Catholic Church, and in our modern science. And Latin was around before Christianity, for sure. Greek, too.
There seems to be something in us ? around us ? that makes us suffer from being conscious, aware, thinking, feeling beings, as though "it" would be better for us to not suffer as a result of being alive, and that we would/will be healed when we no longer suffer.
Conscious of what ? of... self ? of ourselves as separate beings, separate from creation, unlike the trees, or animals that we perceive as not sharing our suffering ?
The power that we have over the natural world has not made an end to the suffering that comes from our being simply conscious, and conscious that we are thinking, feeling beings, which divides us from inside. And our control and mastery over nature does not include the nature that is written into our very bodies in places that we cannot see, or maybe even imagine.
Is our Christian faith supposed to wipe a slate clean, and erase our consciousness of self, in order to ease the suffering that comes from it ? I'm not sure at all.
Not much that I am sure of these days...
Thanks for the fine talk, Paul. I was particularly interested in your references to Hermann Daly. Can you recall which book of his you were referring to?
Excellent talk, Paul.
The very first thing that I ever read by Wendell Berry is his essay 'Christianity and the Survival of Creation,' which had been reprinted in a now-defunct Orthodox quarterly called "Epiphany Journal." I don't remember exactly when this would have been, but I'm thinking mid-90's. In any case, I was bowled over by the piece, which covers somewhat similar territory to your talk, and immediately bought the Berry book in which the essay originally appeared, "Sex, Economy, Freedom & Commmunity." Although it comes from a different perspective (Berry, as you know, is an American of Baptist background), it's a great companion-piece to your talk. Can't remember if it appeared in "The World-Ending Fire" but I'm thinking not (don't have my copy handy to check).
Oddly enough, the first time as a Christian that I heard anything on this subject was way back in the late 70's when I read a little book by the Evangelical theologian/philosopher Francis Schaeffer called "Pollution and the Death of Man." Schaeffer, I think, was making an appeal to his fellow Evangelicals that their attitude towards Creation was important and that ecological concerns shouldn't be dismissed by Christians. I recall thinking at the time that it was something of a brave book in that in those days "ecology" was widely seen by American Christians as a "leftist" thing and therefore suspect. My copy of that book is long gone, but I should get one and reread it to see what my thoughts are 45 years later.
(Edit: just had a look online and saw that Schaeffer's book was reprinted in 2022 with a new afterword by the editor and two appendices by sociologist Richard Means, one of which deals with Lynn White's essay.)