Our friends at Restoring Eden are going on tour this summer, and you can join them!
Restoring Eden, a Christian ministry empowering Christians to engage in creation care through education, public advocacy, environmental stewardship, and nature appreciation, is touring Christian music festivals this summer to inform and mobilize Christians who care about the earth and our impact on it, especially in the area of mountaintop removal mining.
Restoring Eden is looking for 2-4 individuals to join them in paid internship positions for the summer’s activities. Visit Restoring Eden’s website or view this description of the internship for more information.
By Tracey Bianchi
Flourish Magazine,
Winter 2010
Oh! Teach us to live well!
Teach us to live wisely and well!
- Psalm 90:12 MSG
Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need,
but not every man’s greed.
- Gandhi
Craning my neck, I looked out the back window of my car and zipped down our driveway. We were off again for another morning preschool loop. My toddler whined for his pacifier, my infant daughter had already tossed her rattle to the floor, and my preschooler wanted gum.
As we merged into morning traffic, my then four-year-old gazed out the window and asked, “What does important mean?”
Always hyper about an educational opportunity, I threw the question back at him. “Well, honey, what do you think it means?”
He grunted, not impressed by my savvy parenting, and explained that he did not know, which was why he asked in the first place. So I started rattling off a list of important things: family, friends, God. After a few tries, he got into the game, and we bantered back and forth: his brother, his bed, his blankie.
As we pulled up to a stoplight my son’s eyes must have been drawn to the park on the corner, ringed by enormous trees.
“Mommy, do you know what else is important? Trees are important,” he said.
My morning caffeine jolted me into a giddy chatter. “Yes, yes, yes,” I cheered from the driver’s seat. Indeed, trees are important. After years of coaching and cajoling it seemed my son was destined to start Greenpeace for Preschoolers.
I am a self-proclaimed tree hugger. I recycle like a mad woman. I think camping is God’s gift to the overcivilized. I honk at people who whip fast-food wrappers from car windows. Plastic makes me panic. Trees are important! This was the sort of statement I’d waited four years to hear.
“So, honey, why do you think trees are important?” My waiting eyes darted to the rearview mirror.
My darling son paused, and then said thoughtfully, “So they can catch on fire and we can chop them down.”
My heart slid to the floor mat as he droned on about firefighters and logging trucks, the things dear to his manly little heart. Apparently impressing the value of God’s creation on my children would require more than a few bedtime stories and wishful thinking. [Read More]
[Ed. note: this article is part of our series of weekly family activities called Family Fun, published on Fridays]
However your garden grows, start growing it now!
Believe it or not, it’s time to start your garden!
Kids are a lot like plant seedlings: small but fast-growing; fragile but strong; reminders of God’s grace and life’s important things; and in need of good care.
So what better activity to involve your kids in this weekend—when winter is saying its last goodbyes and spring its first hellos—than seed starting? Putting a seed in the dirt and nurturing its growth are some of the easiest and most delightful activities a young child can do, and the process of planting a seed, nourishing it with God’s simple provisions (soil, light, and water), and watching it flourish is a good learning experience for the whole family. It’s also a money saver—growing plants from seed is more economical than buying seedlings, and harvesting your own vegetables is priceless!
Here’s how to get started: [Read More]
by Kendra Langdon Juskus
[Ed. note: This article is part of our series of weekly reflections, called Deep Down Things, published on Wednesdays.]
Are baby steps worthless?
“Personal change doesn’t equal social change,” says writer Derrick Jensen in a July/August 2009 Orion Magazine article that has already been addressed, at length, here at Flourish. Ever a provocative advocate for wholesale structural and societal deconstruction as the only solution to the brokenness of creation, Jensen believes that the small steps taken by many seeking to live rightly are, alone, worthless. They must, at the very least, bolster a larger surge of resistance to an oppressive economic, governmental, and cultural structure.
From this point of view, small steps are dangerous. They lure us into thinking that we are doing something helpful for creation and for our brothers and sisters, while allowing us to ignore that the whole shebang is still falling down all around us. They block the trajectory of what could be meaningful change.
But there is another instance in which small steps, of a different kind, are equally threatening. [Read More]
The Gift of Good Land
Today’s response to Wendell Berry’s essay “The Gift of Good Land” comes from Ed Brown, director of the environmental missions organization Care of Creation.
“The Gift of Good Land,” was published 30 years ago, and we reprinted it in the Fall 2009 issue of Flourish Magazine to celebrate Mr. Berry’s work, but also to provoke some questions: How has the natural world, and efforts to steward it, changed in these 30 years? How has Christianity changed? What is still relevant about Mr. Berry’s words today? What have been our successes and failures as creation’s stewards in these three decades? Where do we go from here?
We’ve asked a wide variety of Christian thinkers, writers, and leaders to respond to Mr. Berry’s essay, taking into consideration these questions and their own relevant experiences. Here is Ed Brown’s reflection:
The Good Word on the Good Land
By Ed Brown
On being introduced to the world of Christian environmental stewardship about ten years ago, I found that I had a lot of catching up to do. Wendell Berry was one of the authors I was directed to, and he has taught and continues to teach me. Evidently, this is true of many of my colleagues as well. It is a privilege to be counted among those who have sat at Wendell’s feet and learned from him, and I am sure I am not the only one who wishes that that learning could have been in person rather than through the pages of his books.
“The Gift of Good Land” appeals to me not only for what it says, but for the method that Berry uses to discover the truths he wants to share. This is not so much an essay as a sermon, in the very best sense of the word. His purpose is twofold: “to attempt a biblical argument for ecological and agricultural responsibility” and “to examine the practical implications of such an argument.” I’m not sure how Berry would feel about this analysis, but really, what he’s giving us is an old-fashioned expository message from Scripture, complete with exegesis and application. I know more than a few pastors who could learn from this essay. [Read More]
By Dean Ohlman
[Ed. note: This article is part of our series of weekly reflections, called Deep Down Things, published on Wednesdays. It was originally published at Wonder of Creation.]
The creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God (Romans 8:20-21).
C.S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis and Francis Schaeffer have both helped me form my view of the meaning of the natural world. And it was Lewis who introduced me to the literary and spiritual mentor who helped him form his view of the creation, among many other views: George MacDonald.
I have used MacDonald’s and Schaeffer’s thoughts extensively in my writing, but have somewhat ignored Lewis. So today I am going to let “Jack” have a say. [Read More]
From Kendra Langdon Juskus, Managing Editor
Flourish Magazine,
Winter 2010
As winter rounds the final bend of its course, we find ourselves balanced between enduring the season’s final, coldest days, and gratefully anticipating the relief of spring. For many Christians, this is also when we walk the tightrope of Lent according to the church calendar, empowered to abide a season of fasting only by the promise of the resurrection feast.
So it’s appropriate that this winter issue of Flourish magazine attempts a similar balance. It includes reminders of hardship and grief, reminiscent of winter’s enforced denial, but concludes its last page with a reflection on gardening—the delight of cultivation that reignites each spring. [Read More]
