Hands across the ocean
You know how it is when you meet a stranger and somehow you just “click”. That’s been our recent experience at Borrowed Time where we have been in touch with John Elwood and Lowell Bliss from the Eden Vigil Institute in the USA. The Institute, in its own words, “promotes research and reflection, education and discussion on the spiritual, religious, economic and other roots of the climate and ecological crisis.” https://www.edenvigil.org/
John and Lowell have recently concluded an ambitious consultation exercise, seeking to address the questions and challenges posed to Christian faith by “eco-realism”- which in their terms arises from an honest facing up to the facts of climate change and ecological collapse. Eco-realism also acknowledges how much our planet has already changed. We are in the midst of crisis now, as millions of poorer people throughout the world know from experience. We no longer have any assurance about what the future might hold: our old future has disappeared.
The conclusions and suggestions that arose from the consultation bear striking similarities (and, of course, some differences) to the thoughts and insights that we at Borrowed Time have encountered during the last few years. John and Lowell have produced a powerful and persuasive summary which can be found here: https://www.edenvigil.org/eco-realism-papers/2024/9/3/reflections-on-the-consultation-whats-clear-what-calls
As a summary of a summary, here are the main points, offered in hope that they will bring murmurs of assent and also whet appetites to read the document in full via the above link.
“Four basic premises framed our discussions over five months, summarized here as:
That we and our world must now experience potentially unprecedented hard times;
That a faith that primarily accentuates comforting positives is now becoming unintelligible;
That the future now demands our focus on the suffering of life in a failing ecosystem; and
That we must now interrogate our inherited systems within a vastly different context.”
What John and Lowell kept hearing in response to this was-
“We need each other – places of shared resolve-
We need to discover new ways of faithful living – we need greater attention to finding and internalizing more just and compassionate ways of being human-
Troubled by tendencies towards tribal isolation, we need to foster broader spheres of belonging.”
Following this, and in order to be of practical benefit, future endeavours might include the following:
“Facilitating personal connections; repositioning eco-realism as distinct from climate action; developing an apocalyptic voice; re-evaluating our stance towards immediate victories and losses; welcoming theological imagination; prioritizing the identification and clarification of new purposes; and foregrounding investment in persons.”
This is innovative and exciting work with which we are delighted to be associated. We look forward very much to future discussions.
Background information about the consultation and its methodology can be found here: