Greenblade

“But if there is one lesson above all from this disaster, it is that business cannot continue as usual. The economic interests of the oil industry cannot be allowed to trump the long-term health of the gulf and the jobs and the lives that depend on it.” (What the Gulf Can’t Afford, NYTimes, June 26, 2010) Read more of this post

We are all like the blind men arguing over the nature of the elephant. Some insist it is like a rope, others that it is like a trunk, others a wall or a branch. Each is touching only one part of the elephant and trying to make it fit into a category, to insist it is like something they already know. Read more of this post

She sits in medallions of stained glass, sculpted emblems, and in paintings where she is often perched on the cross of the crucifixion. Standing in her nest she appears to tear her own breast, the drops of blood falling into the mouths of her young whom she saves or revives through her sacrifice.

The image is found in Pliny, in Isadore of Seville, and in the medieval bestiaries. All of these sources observed nature carefully but they also repeated stories they had heard, often quite (to us) fantastic, about the nature of the creatures. All grant to the creatures deeper meaning, lessons that they were thought to embody about God’s ordering of creation. Read more of this post

The disaster in the Gulf is so huge, with implications that are so far-reaching, that it is tempting to drown in its horror. More plumes of oil, lives destroyed, habitats ruined, politicians calling for more help, other politicians demanding that drilling be resumed – it is hard to look away.

In Fields of Compassion, Judy Cannato says, “The only grace we can have is the grace we can imagine. If we cannot see it, we cannot engage it. If we cannot engage it we cannot manifest it, we cannot be the co-creators we are invited to be.” Read more of this post

What happened, exactly, to Saul on the road to Damascus? In the story he is thrown from his horse and blinded and hears a voice saying, reasonably enough, “Why are you persecuting me?” Saul had to have thought he was doing the right thing, by whatever measure he made that decision, but something happened to make him look at things differently. He is baptized, becomes Paul, and turns into one of the church’s primary, most enduring, and (to many, including me) most annoying defenders. Read more of this post

The first time I saw a galaxy through a high-powered telescope the thing I was most aware of was not its beauty and grandeur, but its silence. Such a thing seemed to demand a movie score, the ones that tell you in music how you should react to what you are seeing: “It’s not a good idea to go into that parking garage; the bad guy is in there.” Read more of this post

Adam knew he was screwed. He knew it as soon as he heard God walking in the garden in the cool of the day. He had done what God told him not to do and now there would be hell to pay, he just knew it. That is our story, our mythology, and we are reliving it in real time. We’ve f*&*ked up big time, messing with God’s Creation, killing all those creatures, destroying what we haven’t even begun to understand. God is walking in the garden. Read more of this post