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Friday, September 14, 2007

Rain! (& related religious resources)


Glory hallelujah. It is pouring rain after weeks and weeks of drought in this part of North Carolina.

This doesn't mean the drought is over, but it's something. The oppressive heat has also broken.

See this short, accessible article "Talking about the Weather" by ecofeminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether. (This comes to us courtesy of the Pacific School of Religion (PSR) at the Graduate Theological Union (GTU), where Ruether is faculty emerita.) It's several years old, but the points it makes about climate change are even more important today.

How do we talk about the weather? What do we notice? How many weather-related items have you heard on the news this week, from around the world?

And here is a paper on water and the world water crisis, in PDF form (so you can print it out easily) and rather long, but clear, interesting, well-researched, and important, by another Catholic feminist theologian, my friend and colleague Marian Ronan, who teaches at the American Baptist Seminary of the West (ABSW) , which like PSR is a member school of the GTU consortium in Berkeley, California.

His All Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew has been very active in environmental issues in the World Council of Churches and has written a number of beautiful statements, on water especially. This one is in PDF form.

I wonder how many Episcopal people and congregations in our Diocese of North Carolina (one of three Episcopal dioceses in the state of North Carolina) know that we passed a resolution specifically about water in 2003. I knew about our environmental sustainability resolution of this year because I was at Convention in January, but not about this 2003 resolution (available via the Episcopal Ecological Network), which is from before my time in NC and is more than just a statement; it contains action suggestions for stewardship of water. Time to pull it out of mothballs, I think. (And to replace the mothballs with something more environmentally friendly ;-)).

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