Ten accomplished scholars working at the intersection of Christian faith and ecology were invited to respond to the following prompt: Identify ways in which Christian spirituality (as an integrally related, but distinct and vital complement to Christian beliefs and ethical imperatives) might helpfully resource a more harmonious and sustainable human relationship to an imperiled natural order. While diverse in perspective, and often autobiographical and evocative, the responses offered affirm the need among Christians for a more deeply motivating sense of personal connection to Earth's creatures and places. Collectively, these responses trace the contours of a potentially transformative Christian ecospirituality.
This essay treats the growing phenomenon of climate-related despair. It examines the emotional landscape of climate anxiety, grief, guilt, and paralysis as reported by both scholars and practitioners, and suggests that the Christian apophatic tradition can help us understand and process such strong climate-related emotions. Drawing on the work of Constance FitzGerald, Jonathan Lear, and certain Christian mystics, it likens climate despair to the experience of the via negativa, considering the "dark night of the planet" as potentially a site of creative possibilities we are not yet able to imagine.
Ecospirituality provides a disciplinary home for scholars and practitioners who value exploration and affirmation of the sacred experienced within our profound belonging as bodies in creaturely continuity with all that is and within an awe-inspiring Universe. This essay engages the question of how recent a phenomenon ecospirituality is, while identifying key thinkers working in this area in recent decades and today. Throughout, it shows that ecospirituality's main contribution to Christian spirituality studies is to provide material strategies for replenishing our sense of human identity as fundamentally belonging within our cosmic home.
Preachers attuned to the climate crisis have a vital role to play in fostering ecospiritual practices that can sustain communities in times of threat and catalyze action for change. This essay explores three vectors of spiritual formation beneficial for the healing of the planet: the practice of ecologically focused preaching, the development of an ethics of interspecies kinship, and the tending of networks for spiritual transformation. The essay describes the design and pedagogy of an eco-preaching course at Yale Divinity School, considers ways to foster interspecies kinship, and details a grant-funded initiative that supports eco-preaching and other ecospirituality programming.
This essay proposes that the medieval theology of the Franciscan friar Bonaventure and the spirituality of Francis of Assisi offer a Christian perspective that can ground dialogue with animistic cosmologies. In Laudato Si', devoted to care for our common home, the Earth, Pope Francis offers a spirituality that reflects beliefs found in Bonaventure and Francis of Assisi and is congruent with key animistic values. Indeed, the Pope convoked a synod on the Amazon that explored how the wisdom of Amazon tribes can contribute to a Christian ecospirituality.
Economistic thinking honors quantifiable measures of growth above material consequences, thus functioning as a key source of modern human be-ings' alienation from creation and from our own embodied creatureliness. Such measures often strike us as objective, which renders them immune to theological analysis or moral critique. In truth, they function as contestable objects of worship that inculcate spiritually malforming habits. A necessary response to economism and its destructive consequences for ecological flourishing and human happiness therefore includes counterliturgies of uselessness, which is to say, habits of life oriented toward measures of goodness that transcend economism.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Christology describes Jesus Christ as the simultaneous boundary, mediator, and center of all human relations. I extend these images beyond the human realm to explore this "Jesus Between" as congruent with scientific descriptions of the inter-relationality of the cosmos, a perspec-tive resonant also with Thich Nhat Hanh's language of "interbeing" and with Maya Ward's leadership, in dialogue with Gay'wu teachers and Country, of land-based processes of emergent "co-becoming." Perceiving Jesus as between fosters a Christian practice of complex animate relations: a way to understand Colossians 1:17 proclaiming, in Thomas Berry's words, "the universe [as] the ultimate sacred reality."
This essay examines the growing recognition of Indigenous wisdom within Catholic ecclesial consciousness, focusing on the Mapuche concept of k & uuml;me mongen ("good living"). Drawing on Laudato Si' and Querida Amazonia, it argues for a shift from evangelization toward intercultural and interreligious dialogue, acknowledging Indigenous spirituality as vital for addressing today's ecological crisis. K & uuml;me mongen embodies harmony with nature, community, and the sacred, offering an alternative to extractivist models. Listening to this wisdom invites transformative openness, enriching Christian spirituality and fostering ecological and social justice through dialogue and shared practices.
This essay argues that Simone Weil's writings offer a powerful resource for reclaiming a life-affirming Christian asceticism. It explores three insights of particular relevance in face of the contemporary culture of instant gratification: a lucid view of human frailty and of the seduction of power; an emphasis on the life-giving nature of distance and self-restraint; and the develop-ment of the central concept of attention. Weil's asceticism of attention, in this way, far from confirming the portrayal of Christian asceticism as a rejection of the body and the world, serves an embodied and reflective presence to the world and others.
In recent years, scholars have identified the phenomenon of ecophobia which, according to the literary theorist Simon C. Estok, can be understood as "a uniquely human psychological condition that prompts antipathy toward nature." This essay considers ecophobia as a spiritual condition in need of correction. The author argues that the fourth-century Augustine of Hippo and twelfth-century Hugh of St. Victor offer resources for contemporary spiritual seekers to respond to this ecophobic tendency in contemporary society through reading the "book of nature." The essay concludes with suggestions about how concrete practices can support such renewed nature literacy.
