GOD & NATURE

Could it be that contemporary ecological degradation is a result, in part, of us not knowing our place? Steven Bouma Prediger writes in his book, For the Beauty of the Earth, “We care for only what we love. We love only what we know. We truly know only what we experience. If we do not know our place – know it in more than a passing, cursory way, know it intimately and personally – than we are destined to abuse it.” Much of what we do and think about at CCSP is fundamentally about relationships – between people, place, and God. The past two weeks the students have been taking God & Nature, a class designed to help students develop a theology of creation that understands humans as stewards of the earth. We spent the first week with Sylvia Keesmaat, a New Testament Biblical scholar and long time CCSP faculty, talking about and reading the biblical narrative with new eyes. The second week was with Rolf Bouma, an environmental ethicist and director of the Center for Faith & Scholarship in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Though we considered topics like deep ecology, eco-feminism, the “wilderness” debate, and animal rights, the week is designed to help us understand better what it means for us to understand scripture and offer Christian responses to current environmental problems.