Last Friday was  “Black Friday”, when the world goes crazy over shopping.  There was a lot of controversy in the days leading up to the event concerning stores opening not at 5 am, not ta 4 am, not even at midnight, but as early as 10 pm the evening of Thanksgiving.  This controversy was misguided.  The issue should not have been Black Friday “invading” Thanksgiving’s time slot, but Black Friday happening at all… As for me, my experience of Black Friday was different and unexpectedly blessed. What did I do on Black Friday?  I went to a funeral.  Read on…

I am an incurable news-addict, so I suppose it’s my own fault that I had heartburn before breakfast on Black Friday.  I woke up to a story from the Los Angeles Times that many of you probably saw in some form sometime during the weekend:

Matthew Lopez went to the Wal-Mart in Porter Ranch on Thursday night for the Black Friday sale but instead was caught in a pepper-spray attack by a woman who authorities said was “competitive shopping.” Read more »

A couple of weeks ago I attended a conference in Bozeman, Montana.  The announced topic was ‘Human and Environmental Health: Social Justice Implications: A Program for Religious Leaders and others…’  The setting was magnificent:  A century old railroad inn an hour’s drive from the western entrance to Yellowstone Park, surrounded by the mountain ranges for which Bozeman is famous.  But what made this conference unique was the oxymoronic nature of the sponsors.  FREE (The Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment) is a conservative institution dedicated to the application of what they would consider ‘sound economic principles’ to environmental problems.  I call them my ‘libertarian economist environmentalist friends’, and while I happily retain my own convictions, I found much that was profitable in this conference.

New Friends

As with any gathering of people around a common concern, the most profitable and enjoyable aspect of this conference was the people.  There were just 25 of us including presenters, and we represented a wide range of intellectual and religious  and career backgrounds.  A number of mainline protestants (Methodist, Episcopalian, Presbyterian and so on), a couple of Catholics, one Orthodox priest, two Rabbis (including one who survived the Holocaust as a teenager), and yes, four or five evangelicals. Someone commented than an afternoon hike could have been a joke:  “A priest, a rabbi and a minister went up a mountain…” Read more »

My niece Stephanie Burkard has just finished her freshman year at Old Dominion University and wrote the following essay for a scholarship contest.  (See the link toward the end of the piece to help her win…)  I post it here with her permission.  [And if you are also a student and have a piece like this that you'd like to see published, send it my way. ]

I picked up Blue Like Jazz this week.  Chapter 2 coincided with some deeper thoughts I’ve been having.  One sentence sums up the chapter.  ”I am the problem” (Miller, 20).

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Oil Spills are bad enough – but how do you pray about a Tsunami?

It hasn’t been a year since the Gulf oil spill, which we rightly saw as the worst environmental disaster in memory.  At that time I wrote a piece trying to come to terms with that situation: “How Do You Pray about an Oil Spill?” And now I sit pondering a disaster that could turn out to be exponentially greater than the BP/Halliburton fiasco.  I am doing so at my dining room table, in a part of the world that is seismically if not politically stable, many miles from the nearest nuclear facility.  I am looking out at a landscape where the first birds of spring have arrived and are singing up a storm: Robins, redwing blackbirds, a cedar waxwing and (I think) a pine warbler (see pic below and tell me if I’m right, birders!)  just this morning.  The contrast between my window and the stories on my computer screen could not be more different, and I am forced to ask the same question I asked last summer: How do I pray about what is now happening in Japan? Read more »

This is the final post in a series leading up to the third Lausanne conference that begins in just a few days – on Sunday, 17 October in Cape Town.  Earlier posts in this series are here; up to now, these have been summaries and excerpts from my book, Our Father’s World.  Today’s post is different.  This is a call to action that summarizes the challenge I will be sharing with a group of delegates at Cape Town.

We have been making the following case in this series:

• the environmental crisis is a direct result of human sin;
• God’s redemptive plan in Jesus Christ includes the restoration of all of our broken relationships, including our relationship to non-human creation;
• The church – the people of God – can respond to the environmental crisis in ways that no one else can;

From this case, it is hard to escape the following conclusion: Read more »

This is a continuation of a series of articles leading up to the third Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization that begins in Cape Town South Africa on October 15.  Today’s post is a continuation of the last as we move from the Fall to Redemption. Find the whole series to date here. Today we begin to answer an important question:  When the problems raised by the environmental crisis are as big and technical as they seem to be, what exactly does the church bring to the table?  Do we really have anything to offer?  Let’s find out…

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So how do we get the mission of the church out to onto the environmental Mifflin Streets of the world? How can a group of people that might know how to conduct a prayer meeting but doesn’t know anything about water quality make a difference?  What, really, does the church bring to this crisis? Read more »