Clarion: Journal of Spirituality and Justice

The Fundamentalists Holding Us Back from a Climate Change Solution - Allie Conti

The Fundamentalists Holding Us Back from a Climate Change Solution

The evangelical Christian movement has been at war with environmentalism for decades—but the stakes have never been higher.

 

By ALLIE CONTI illustrated by LIA KANTROWITZ

Aug 20 2017, 7:15pm

WN: It is truly tragic to see US politics swayed by a minority of religious climate change deniers – out of all proportion to their numbers. On this issue, as so many others, I am embarrassed to be associated with this kind of “Christianity”. Lord, have mercy!

excerpts:

There are an estimated 35 million biblical literalists in the United States. These people—who may think, for instance, God intends for the Earth to end like it’s written in Revelation anyway, so who am I to intervene?— are incredibly hard to convert to the cause of fighting climate change. Pleas from secular scientists and journalists are going to fall on deaf ears; the two sides end up mostly talking past each other.

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Jesus is Returning Soon. I mean it. - Fr Kenneth Tanner

Listen up.
Jesus is returning soon.
I mean it.

He's coming back—right now—anywhere in the world the Lord's Supper or Communion or the Eucharist or the Divine Liturgy is celebrated...and that is happening almost constantly in all sorts of churches in all kinds of settings across the globe every hour of the day.

Jesus is coming again—right now—in the poor whose path crosses with yours—in all prisoners, in the naked, in the hungry, in the thirsty, in the diseased—if you have eyes to see.

Jesus is coming again in Christians on seven continents who continue his incarnation in the world as his body, wherever two or more are gathered before the sacred Name.

Wherever the gospel is spoken, wherever its God-blessed words are uttered, Jesus is returning on wings of mercy to those who have ears to hear.

The Shekinah made visible inhabits also the praises of his people, whenever and wherever spiritual songs and hymns ring out the glory he shares from eternity with the Father and Spirit.

Oh, right...and, yes, of course, the yet-incarnate Jesus—the eternal son of God, who bears the flesh he took from Mary, and by whose DNA he is human brother and sister of every person who has ever breathed or who ever will—is returning at the "end of the age," to usher in a New Creation free from pestilence, hunger, war, pain, sorrow, and death.

But if I were a betting man, observing the patience of God during my 52 years, and as I read the records of his deliberative words and works down the centuries, seeing his great humility toward his creation, even pausing for us to mature as a species attempting to live out his order of love, I would not be looking for *that* promised second advent anytime soon.

I could easily see it taking a thousand years and a thousand more.

In the meantime the richness and variety of Christ's Presence overwhelms and blesses me, at times, even as I experience his absence, and I am confident he is making all things new.

In a great mystery, it seems only the Father knows the times and seasons when he will bring all things to a fitting consummation and—experiencing as I do his prodigious love for all humanity—I would not deny him the brilliant Indian scientist of the twenty-second century, her worship of Christ evident in all she does to serve the creation by the loving vulnerability Jesus models for her, or the twenty-fifth century Moroccan who makes a garden of the Sahara, or the couple in 3016 who writes an ageless poem of lament over the loss of their child set to whatever instrument they play by then as an anthem of their anguished praise for a beautiful world they perceive is made by God but still broken, awaiting the resurrection kingdom without tears or death where they see their child again.

Who am I to tell God when the beautiful work of populating an eternal, divinely-inhabited, and humanly-governed earth is done?

What about this planet or our cosmos gives you the impression that God is in a hurry?

And God is anyway with us, as Christ said, until the end of the world (which we know is only the world's beginning).

Review of Ron Dart's "The North American High Tory Tradition" - by Tyler Chamberlain

Book Review: Dart, Ron (2016). The North American High Tory Tradition. New York: American Anglican Press.

The rise of Donald Trump has put thoughtful conservatives on both sides of the border in an awkward position.  The time is ripe for sophisticated and responsible articulations of conservatism in thought and action.  Ron Dart’s The North American High Tory Tradition combines the timeliness of thoughtful conservatism in the age of Trump with the timelessness of an old and near-forgotten Canadian tradition with roots stretching back to before confederation in 1867.  The High Tory Tradition, as Dart calls it, can be summarized by the following ten principles:

1. The wisdom of tradition.
2. Passion for the common good.
3. Economics cannot be separated from ethics.
4. Protection of the environment against abuse for the sake of profit.
5. State and society are not in opposition.
6. Concern for the commons, against the classical- and neo-liberal emphasis on private property.
7. The purpose of education is to ground the student in the best that has been thought in the past, not to impart skills.
8. Human nature is imperfect, finite, and fallible.
9. Ethics and religion are the foundation of a healthy state.
10. Reality consists of nuanced gradations of better and worse, and cannot be reduced to simplistic absolutes.

The North American High Tory Tradition consists of 25 short chapters which are best described as variations on a single theme.  Throughout these 25 chapters, using a disparate collection of scholars, artists, and activists, Dart frequently circles back to the distinctiveness of the Canadian Nationalist-High Tory emphasis on “Peace, Order, and Good Government” over against the American idealization of “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”  Whether comparing Noam Chomsky’s Anarchist-Leftist critique of American foreign policy with a Tory critique of the individualism underlying the Left and Right of American politics, or highlighting similarities between George Grant and Stephen Leacock, Dart gives the reader an unmistakeable sense of the frame of mind from which the High Tory tradition emanates.

The table is set with an analysis of misused American power abroad; St. Augustine is used to expose the hypocritical classification of terrorists that sanctions their being treated differently than state-based perpetrators of violence.  A few other highlights are worth noting.  The relatively long twelfth chapter compares the Toryisms of C.S. Lewis and George Grant, who participated in Lewis’ Socratic Club while at Oxford.  The value of this chapter lies in the fact that little work has thus far been done on either their differences or similarities.  Dart’s analysis reveals their similar outlooks, though Lewis left his political thought relatively underdeveloped.  Chapter sixteen provides a seven stage history of the liberal principle of the freedom of the individual from external constraints and authorities.  It closes by pointing to liberalism’s problematic failure to be critical of its own intellectual standards, constraints, and assumptions.  Finally, Dart’s introduction to Tory thinkers and activists is biographical such that we are treated to the many personal connections between them as well as their ideas themselves.

At the level of ideas, this book presents much that is agreeable and little that is prima facie questionable, which paradoxically points to its biggest omission: its tendency to refrain from sustained exposition of either the general principles of High Toryism or of individual Tories themselves.  Dart’s exposition of Leacock’s The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice will serve, in this instance, to illustrate this overall tendency.

Leacock’s text embodies at least seven of the ten principles of High Toryism (i.e. #2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, and possibly 4), but The North American High Tory Tradition gives very little exposition of Leacock’s economic and moral arguments themselves.  For example, Leacock demonstrates that the economic laws of supply and demand alone will not result in just wages, and that the Liberal faith that they will ignores the role of unequal power in economic relationships (Leacock, ch. 3-4).  This speaks to the danger of evaluating economics apart from ethics and points to the moral purpose of the state, namely to equalize imbalances of economic and social power.  Leacock then argues in favour of the moral obligations between rich and poor citizens (ch. 7), and suggests that fallible human nature will necessarily disrupt any communist system (ch. 5-6).  His solution is the classical High Tory one: a via media between full communism and completely unregulated capitalism.  It is not that Dart misrepresented Leacock, just that his presentation of the High Tory way would have benefited from thicker descriptions of the political arguments of Leacock, Forsey, Grant, and others.  What High Toryism means in practice would have been clearer if arguments like Leacock’s had been presented and brought to bear on contemporary political issues.

In sum, Dart gives us an important vision of a timeless conservatism for the 21^st century, and in so doing initiates the reader into some of the central conversations within the High Tory tradition.  The strength of the book is its depiction of the High Tory attitude in practice, in conversation with other political visions.  This strength could possibly have been even stronger had there been a closer connection drawn between this attitude and the specific political and economic arguments and prescriptions of the North American High Tory thinkers.