Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Sallie McFague, from "An Earthly Theological Agenda"


Please read the full article: http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=54

Human responsibility for the fate of the earth is a recent and terrible knowledge; our loss of innocence is total, for we know what we have done. If theologians were to accept this context and agenda of their work, they would see themselves in dialogue with all those in other areas and fields similarly engaged: those who feed the homeless and fight for animal rights; the cosmologists who tell us of the common origins (and hence interrelatedness) of all forms of matter and life; economists who examine how we must change if the earth is to support its population; the legislators and judges who work to advance civil rights for those discriminated against in our society; the Greenham women who picket nuclear plants, and the women of northern India who literally "hug" trees to protect them from destruction, and so on and on.

Theology is an "earthly" affair in the best sense of that word: it helps people to live rightly, appropriately, on the earth, in our home. It is, as the Jewish and Christian traditions have always insisted, concerned with "right relations," relations with God, neighbor and self, but now the context has broadened to include what has dropped out of the picture in the past few hundred years--the oppressed neighbors, the other creatures and the earth that supports us all.

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