This session examines the interplay between Christian spirituality, ecological discourse, and the contemplative facets inherent within religious belief and practice. Drawing upon a diverse array of theological paradigms, these papers center on deliberative engagements concerning the urgent need of creation stewardship and the call for Christians to assume custodial roles in the preservation of the Earth as an adjunct to spiritual praxis. Also considered is the emotive resonance elicited by instances of environmental degradation, fostering discourse on the ethical mandate for compassionate responses and proactive engagement with the vulnerability of our ecological home.
Aiming at developing Pope Francis’s call to attend to the gaze of Jesus (Laudato Si’ 96-100) this paper offers a reflection on St. Ignatius Loyola’s “Contemplation on the Incarnation” from the Spiritual Exercises alongside poet Warsan Shire’s “What They Did Yesterday Afternoon” to explore the possibility of acquiring a “green gaze” for the earth as the broken body of God. Such an approach acquires the (possible) gaze of Jesus, but shifts attention away from Francis’s emphasis on praise and wonder at creation, and towards the need to respond to brokenness and suffering. Taking a cue from Shire, this paper argues that Francis’s ecological vision can be strengthened by stronger attention to theologies of liberation which in their own way echo Shire’s poetic question “Where does it hurt?,” and likewise facilitate an experience of the world’s response: “Everywhere, everywhere, everywhere.”
Christian theology has traditionally spoken of creation as a book, a means of revelation that can be metaphorically read by human creatures for a variety of purposes. The thirteenth century theologian Bonaventure takes up this tradition, giving the Book of Nature a significant place in his theology. This paper considers Bonaventure’s theology of the Book of Nature in conversation with the concept of the hospitable text, articulated by Rowan Williams. Read in this way and along with Bonaventure, creation becomes a text that invites the reader to pray, both in contemplation and in petition. This paper argues that creation’s invitation to petitionary prayer calls on human creatures to fulfill their priestly role in relationship to creation, even as it grounds humanity in humility. Human creatures are invited to plead with God for creation as it groans under the curse, to recognise their complicity in the cause of its groaning, and to seek creation’s redemption. This paper concludes by considering Bonaventure’s exemplar of St. Francis as one whose response to creation’s invitation demonstrated a life of prayer that integrated contemplation and action.
Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical *Laudato Si’* reignited theological attention to conversations in *deep incarnation,* ecotheology, and Franciscan spirituality. In the face of the environmental crisis, calls for ascetic renunciation and divestment imply that solutions to the crisis reside in spiritualities of self-discipline and mastery. Yet, *Laudato Si’*s account of St. Francis of Assisi’s spirituality of asceticism suggests that the logic of self-mastery is tied to the mastery of others insofar as both involve displacing or diminishment. My paper contrasts an asceticism of mastery and necrophilia with an asceticism of kinship and joy in order to illuminate how St. Francis’s cosmic spirituality is oriented toward communal and ecological wholeness. Francis’s asceticism of kinship culminates in joyful healing and praise. In order to offer an account of St. Francis’s asceticism of kinship I explore *touch*points between *Laudato Si’*, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of sight and “flesh,” and Bonaventure’s cosmic Christology.
Our ongoing ecological crisis is rooted in global economic arrangements that use quantitative measures of value as the sole determinants of a good life. Paradoxically, these measures are both anthropocentric and, in their carelessness of our animal happiness, antithetical to the flourishing of human beings. Modern Christianity’s familiar dualism of soul and body, spirit and matter, inhibit its power to disrupt this engine of alienation from our creatureliness. In this paper I argue that where this conceptuality fails, Christian spiritual disciplines can nonetheless succeed in offering radical forms of resistance. I draw from Br. Paul Quenon’s memoir, In Praise of the Useless Life, to explore the material consequences of joyful liberation from reductive measures of utility. To reject utility is to discover the harmony between our animal happiness and our participation in “the cosmic dance,” while exposing and deactivating the ecocidal lie of “a good life” under contemporary economism.