Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/ecological-transformation/page/13/)
Despite the absence of any strategic conflict in the world, there is a refusal to explore the possibility of ridding the world of nuclear weaponry, and even Obama’s visionary endorsement of a world without nuclear weapons signaled his political detachment with the damning admission that such an outcome might not happen in his lifetime. If not now, when? Are we waiting for a new Cold War or World War III?
I am the first Jew to live in this cloistered Benedictine monastery. I don’t blend. I wear a kippah everywhere I go, and I observe the Sabbath and all Jewish holidays. I’m studying to become a rabbi, and I live here in this remote community of Catholic monks vowed to chastity and obedience.
The idea of an inbuilt drive to care and love is really nothing new, of course. It’s only new to us in trying to scientifically grope our way out of what became the prison of the old scientific mindset into the liberation of a new world allied as friend rather than enemy to spirituality.
What’s the greatest mystery facing every person on the planet? Ultimately, it’s some version of the age-old “Where do I come from? Why am I here? Where am I going?” So far, no one has a satisfactory explanation for the existence of nonphysical minds in this otherwise physical universe.
It is possible that the plant as a living and vital presence responds to the warmth and radiance of the sunlight and turns toward it responsively. This interpretation, which I favor, understands the plant as a spiritual-material unity rather than reducing the plant to the materialist dimension that is visible to the detached, scientific eye.
Is there a spiritual dimension to the story of the universe that biological evolution tells?
Artists who create icons and sacred music often describe their activity as a form of prayer. I think too that if nature is understood, in some sense, as the work of God, then seeking to discover the ways of nature through science might also be experienced as a form of prayer.
Don’t worry, we are not about to join the creationists with their rejection of evolution and insistence that God planted all those dinosaur bones to test your faith. The fact is that most liberals and progressives, in fact, most people who have completed high school, have been heavily indoctrinated into the dominant religion of this historical period, the religion of scientism, and as can be expected, will feel deeply uneasy — if not feeling that they are outright disloyal — if they consider the possibility that another worldview is not only possible but plausible.
The human race — not for the first time in our history — has lost the sacred sense of self-restraint. We don’t restrain ourselves. And what’s the result? The earth will give forth thorns and thistles, not abundance, and you will have to work with the sweat pouring down your faces to get just barely enough to eat.
If we look at early civilizations that declined and collapsed, more often than not it was a shortage of food that brought them down. Until recently I had rejected the idea that food could be the weak link in our modern civilization; I now think it probably is.
As much as I love the Network of Spiritual Progressives, I am not sure how much of a progressive I am. Seems to me that I spend almost all my time trying to keep things from changing, that in some deep sense I am a conservative—conserving the earth!
“A Reenchanted World: The Quest for a New Kinship With Nature” by James William Gibson and “Conservation Refugees: The Hundred-Year Conflict between Global Conservation and Native Peoples” by Mark Dowie: Reviews by Roger S. Gottlieb
Instead of messing around with partial measures, President Obama should transform our approach to the environment by orienting it around this key idea: the earth is not a “resource” to be used for private profit.
This is not an oil “spill” we are facing, the way water might spill from a dish or oil from a tanker—a finite amount in the first place, and then we clean up. This is more like piercing a hole into the Caverns of Hell, so that they pour forth without limit.
It’s not self-sacrifice but liberation that the Tao and all deep spiritual wisdom offer us.
Facing climate change, we must free ourselves or collapse.