The Scholars, or Team Purple, include those who engage with creation care through scholarship: intellectual, theological understandings of creation care.
Some might be interested in hearing and understanding the philosophical and intellectual ideas of creation care, including land sustainability, use of chemicals and pollution, species protection, global racism and the impact on the Global South, and climate change. This group may bring in speakers, panels, discussion groups, or read books or view movies for discussion.
Scroll down for info on current and upcoming book and film studies!
Book Study – Wednesday, October 30, 2024
During September and October, join Team Purple in reading Habitat Threshold by Craig Santos Perez, with a particular focus on the poem “Love in a Time of Climate Change.” We’ll meet on Wednesday, October 30 at 6:30 p.m. to discuss what we’ve read, in person in the Sojourners Room or on Zoom. (See below to request the Zoom link.)
Book description from the University of Chicago Press website:
With Habitat Threshold, Craig Santos Perez has crafted a timely collection of eco-poetry that explores his ancestry as a native Pacific Islander, the ecological plight of his homeland, and his fears for the future. The book begins with the birth of the author’s daughter, capturing her growth and childlike awe at the wonders of nature. As it progresses, Perez confronts the impacts of environmental injustice, the ravages of global capitalism, toxic waste, animal extinction, water rights, human violence, mass migration, and climate change. Throughout, he mourns lost habitats and species, and confronts his fears for the future world his daughter will inherit. Amid meditations on calamity, this work does not stop at the threshold of elegy. Instead, the poet envisions a sustainable future in which our ethics are shaped by the indigenous belief that the earth is sacred and all beings are interconnected—a future in which we cultivate love and “carry each other towards the horizon of care.”
Through experimental forms, free verse, prose, haiku, sonnets, satire, and a method he calls “recycling,” Perez has created a diverse collection filled with passion. Habitat Threshold invites us to reflect on the damage done to our world and to look forward, with urgency and imagination, to the possibility of a better future.
Book Study – Sunday, December 29, 2024
During Advent, join Team Purple in reading All Creation Waits: The Advent Mystery of New Beginnings by Gayle Boss. We’ll meet on Sunday, December 29 at 6:30 p.m. to discuss what we’ve read, in person in the Sojourners Room or on Zoom. (See below to request the Zoom link.)
Book description from the Paraclete Press website:
From the bestselling author of Wild Hope—a beautiful book for Advent.
Open a window each day of Advent onto the natural world. Here are twenty-five fresh images of the foundational truth that lies beneath and within the Christ story. In twenty-five portraits depicting how wild animals of the northern hemisphere ingeniously adapt when darkness and cold descend, we see and hear as if for the first time the ancient wisdom of Advent: The dark is not an end but the way a new beginning comes.
Short, daily reflections that paint in vivid detail the intricate and astonishing ways that familiar animals, from the honeybee to the porcupine, prepare for winter. Paired with charming original wood-cut illustrations, this daily devotional will engage both children and adults. Anyone who feels tired of the consumer hype of “the holiday season” will be refreshed and awakened to the eternal truth the natural world reveals, and will welcome this book.
Advent, to the church Fathers, was the right naming of the season when light and life are fading. They urged the faithful to set aside four weeks to fast, give, and pray—all ways to strip down, to let the bared soul recall what it knows beneath its fear of the dark: that there is One who is the source of all life and is ever creating, One who comes to be with us and in us, even, especially, in darkness and death. One who brings us a new beginning.
The more I’m with animals and the more I learn from them, the more I know they can be more than our companions on this planet. They can be our guides. They can be to us “a book about God…a words of God,” the God who comes, even in the darkest season, to bring us a new beginning. —Gayle Boss, Introduction to “All Creation Waits”
