FaithWorld

The Bible has gone green.

HarperOne has published a Green Bible that highlights with green ink over 1,000 references to the earth and what the publishers say is a scriptural mandate to care for it. The inks are soy-based on recycled paper (of course!).

“The Green Bible will equip and encourage people to see God’s vision for creation and help them engage in the work of healing and sustaining it. With over 1,000 references to the earth in the Bible, compared to 490 references to heaven and 530 references to love, the Bible carries a powerful message for the earth,” HarperOne says on its web site about the publication.

The Green Bible is one new piece in the chain connecting the “creation care” movement, which has linked U.S. evangelicals across the political spectrum, Catholics who stress the social teachings of their church and Orthodox leaders, among others.

The movement has been galvanized by the challenge of climate change and other pressing environmental issues and their impact of the poor — and “God’s creation.”

“The poor and the vulnerable are members of God’s family and are the most severely affected by droughts, high temperatures, the flooding of coastal cities, and more severe and unpredictable weather events resulting from climate change,” Archbishop Desmond Tutu says in a brief foreword to “The Green Bible.”

Imagine you go to a conference on major bioethical questions — controversial issues like abortion, embryonic stem cells, assisted reproduction and euthanasia — and a keynote speaker uses all his allotted time warning about global warming. Is this the wrong issue to discuss — or the only one worth talking about?

The question arose at the annual conference of the European Association of Centres of Medical Ethics (EACME) that ended at the weekend in Prague. Dr. Richard Nicholson, editor of the Bulletin of Medical Ethics, told the assembled bioethicists they had to look beyond their usual issues to consider the far larger ecological threat he said could soon end up destroying mankind.

The issue is urgent for bioethicists, he said, because the healthcare industry in the rich OECD countries is a major source of carbon dioxide emissions. It also spends vast amounts to prolong patients’ lives, about half of it in the final months before death. “The more effort we put into saving individual lives, the more likely we are to doom the human race to extinction,” he said.

“Comfortable candor” is the way Leith Anderson described the atmosphere at the Common Word conference on Christian-Muslim dialogue that ended at Yale University on Thursday. The term is as interesting for its image as for the person who used it. Anderson is president of the U.S. National Association of Evangelicals and one of several evangelicals attending the meeting. Among the mostly Protestant leaders who responded to the Common Word dialogue appeal in a letter launched by Yale Divinity School, evangelicals tended to be more cautious and more concerned about pointing out the fundamental differences between Christianity and Islam. Even with those reservations , these participants faced some criticism in their own ranks for attending and came to the conference not knowing how open it would be.

Anderson told me on the first day that he appreciated how forthright the discussion was, with each side standing up for its beliefs while seeking common ground where they could. In his keynote address in the final session, he put his stamp of approval on the process: “Our differences are deep and real. Sometimes those differences are cultural or ethnic or racial. But I have been especially impressed this week with the comfortable candor with which Muslims and Christians have clearly stated their own doctrines to one another.”

Geoff Tunnicliffe, international director of the World Evangelical Alliance, made the same point in his address. “We can affirm the appropriateness of simply engaging in dialogue and conversation with each other at this critical time in history. It is right that we’re together. We can affirm the development of new and strengthened relationships. It has been good to sit together and build new friendships. We can affirm the genuine spirit of being willing to listen to each other and seeking to gain understanding into each others’ perspectives.”

Move over Religious Right: you’re getting squeezed by the evangelical center.

That is one of the central points of a new book by David P. Gushee entitled “The Future of Faith in American Politics”.

To Gushee, the evangelical center combines much of the theology of the Religious Right with the social concerns of the left, give it a broad engagement in many of the pressing issues of our day.

The Episcopal Church has been riven by the issue of ordaining gay clergy and the broader issue of gay rights. Now Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori has taken a stand on an issue which is probably not as divisive, at least in Episcopal and Anglican circles: climate change.

In a letter to the U.S. Senate on Monday, Schori urged the body to “take up climate change legislation at the earliest possible moment.”

“Climate change is a threat not only to God’s creation but to all of humanity,” Schori said, noting that her concerns were formed by both her faith and her training as a scientist. She has a background in oceanography, making her perhaps better qualified than most spiritual leaders to comment on the issue.