Larry Rasmussen’s, Earth-honoring Faith:
Religious Ethics in a New Key
Written by: Airencia Feodora Sugiarto (502022020)
After a wonderfully evocative “Prelude” (the book’s Introduction), the first three chapters offer:
1) a deep and thoughtful examination of who we are and whence we came (“The Creature We Are); 2) searing and hard scientific truths of a bottom line: “The planet has changed and now we must change with it” (70, “The World We Have”); and 3) the beginning inviting outlines of what is meant by “Earth-honoring faith” (“The Faith We Seek”). The whole book, as per its title, comes back often to the latter as the main melody of this work.
In the full scope of this book, Rasmussen draws from an impressively wide and deep body of sources and voices, from 4th century bishops to modern scientists and hard data, especially in the striking, Earth-harming trends in all categories from 1950 to now (56-57). He finds wisdom and examples of Earth-honoring faith in all of the world’s religions; he mines literature and poetry for inspiring gems (from Denise Levertov, Annie Dillard, and others) and for pertinent epigraphs beginning each chapter.
He does not shy away from the new understandings born of cosmology, or from Thomas Berry’s call to the “Great Work” of our time. Rasmussen more than once lauds the
“wisdom-in-the-making” of the Earth Charter (344, www.earthcharter.org). Yet he masterfully anchors all in long-held ethical theory (albeit in the desperately needed “new key” for our time) and the sacred language of “deep traditions” (Part Two).
Throughout the book, Rasmussen also boldly critiques where our industrial, unrestrained economic growth, capitalist, consumer-oriented society has taken us; and he both calls out, and invites, faith traditions to discern the signs of our times, and to shift “the center of ethics … from the self to the ecosphere as the relational matrix of our lives and responsibility” (78, italics
mine). We must negotiate this transitional time, filled with “adaptive challenges” and “wicked problems” (5, 78) because we are at a crucial “hinge point” in human history (80), and sorely “a species out of context” (205) with the rest of the life of Earth.
Humans have piled up a huge “ecological debt” and have surpassed the carrying and regenerative capacities of the Earth (325) [and] “unfortunately, Mother Nature doesn’t do bailouts” (77). I gladly note the attention given to climate change, and all of its impacts to both planet and people, as perhaps the ultimate wake-up call now for humankind, woven subtly (and often not so-subtly) throughout the book. Rasmussen goes so far as to suggest that historians will one day describe our time as the “fossil-fuel interlude.” (80)
Rasmussen successfully, I feel, makes the claim that there is a key role for the world’s religions to play, in talking more deeply about these topics, in moral formation, and in supplying a sustaining energy (and vision) in times of great challenge. But here’s the rub: “That said, the powers of the world’s faiths are not up to the present task in most of their present forms” (6).
This is the impetus for the book, and it is a valuable, scholarly, and faith-filled attempt to help show us the way.
Rasmussen also brings an important religious perspective to the “Great Work” (a reference to Berry’s concept), in writing that it “… asks [us] for an Earth-honoring faith and a moral universe of more generous proportions than those we presently live.” In other words:
We see ourselves as a segregated species, distinctive, set apart and over. We thus end up in a very odd place, from a moral and theological point of view: a contracting Earth is jeopardized by its acclaimed stewards who don’t even wince at the reality that they have become de-creators. The traditional theological analysis of sin as pan-human waywardness simply falls silent about our species-being and cumulative Homo sapiens threats to life. Some theo-ethical black hole evidently swallowed this sensibility (93).
And so he asks, “What kind of faith is truly Earth-honoring? What kind of ethic its partner?
What kind of faith and ethic yields zest for life through hard transitions? What kind creates renewable moral-spiritual energy to take on tasks that require generations of good work?” (79)
I deeply appreciated Rasmussen’s reference to the venerable Joseph Sittler, who in his 1954 ahead-of-its-time address “A Theology of Earth” vowed as a son of earth [to] know no rest “until Earth’s voices are gathered up” into a deeper and fuller understanding of faith. “Earth’s voices have about them” the shine of the holy. A certain ‘theological guilt’ pursues the mind that impatiently rejects them (Sittler’s words here in italics; 103, n. 63).
Rasmussen continues in a pointedly prophetic way that ought to catch the attention of all
“religious” folk: “The theological guilt rests with God-talk that fails to gather in all of Earth’s voices to sing the hymn of creation or to reflect creation’s ‘shine of the holy’…Shorn of the universe, the worship of God is worship of a human species idol” (103, italics mine.)
Wow. And, yes, I say. Earth-honoring faith is about a “reenchantment” of the world that “restores nature to human consciousness and feeling, nature as a community of subjects, the bearer of mystery and spirit, the ethos of the cosmos, and the womb of all the life we will ever know (77).
Rasmussen also writes helpfully of the need for – and offers current examples– of “anticipatory communities” (121), those oft small in number collections or enterprises of like-minded folk who are already practicing Earth-honoring ways of living. He suggests that faith communities need to help birth, find, and encourage such “anticipatory communities,” ones that live into, already now, the world as it should be – as it must be – for all of planetary life to thrive and flourish in and through these hard times of “wicked problems,” adaptive challenges, and transition. “Wicked problems,” as Rasmussen terms them include such things as climate change and climagration [migration due to climate change], soil erosion, death of coral reefs, diminishment of freshwater supplies, acidification of oceans, rainforests, melting of permafrost, poverty, and economic issues (5,78).
These deep traditions have much to offer us, to counter the crassness and disharmonies of
consumerism; our alienation from the natural world that birthed us; oppression of those without voice or whose voice is not heard (including other-than-human); the folly of how we recklessly regard our primal, sacred life-giving womb of soil, air, water, fire, and light; and the ways the modern technological and industrial era has made the stuff of life into commodities to be bought and sold, leaching the sacred from life.
