What if we face up to the fact that, unlike the U.S. government, Mother Nature doesn’t do bailouts?” Sallie McFague asked an audience at Harvard Divinity School (HDS). In last month’s session, McFague was quoting New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman, while offering her own analysis of the current dual crises rocking the globe, one financial and the other environmental. Both, said the theologian in residence at the Vancouver School of Theology, are the product of greed. “The same insatiable desire for more, more money, more energy … underlies both of these planetary disasters. But while the world’s economy appears to be crawling back to life through substantial governmental interventions, the outlook for the environment, she said, is bleak.
Religion can play a role in numerous ways, McFague suggested. It can help people, particularly city dwellers, connect with the concept of space and place, an understanding that their environment is derived directly from the Earth. What lies behind all construction, the foundation of every city, she said, is nature, “that encompassing and mysterious term for everything that is.” By replacing the traditional Christian concern with time and history with a notion of space and place, she said, there can be a new focus on Earth rather than heaven, on bodies and their basic needs, rather than on “interpretation, meaning, and eternal salvation.”
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