Friday, September 24, 2010
"Ecology, Theology, & the Church: A Liturgical Manifesto!"
How is the Church to respond to today's global eco-justice crisis? This presentation cautiously steers around both the torrents of crisis-talk and the urgent claims of environmental ethics on the life of the Church. The argument focuses on the Church's own Liturgy, and on the Eucharist in particular, with this manifesto: unless the Church's own Liturgy is right, ecologically, the Church will not be fundamentally equipped to respond to the greatest crisis of our times. To this end, several proposals are made for liturgical renewal. A Lutheran pastor with experience in academic, inner-city, and metropolitan settings, the Rev. Dr. H. Paul Santmire has also pursued a scholarly vocation in the discipline of ecological theology and environmental ethics for more than forty years. Much preoccupied with social justice issues throughout his career, Dr. Santmire responded to the church struggle against apartheid in his book South African Testament: From Personal Encounter to Theological Challenge (1987) at the height of the crisis in that country, when there was little hope for peaceful transformation. During his 13-year inner-city pastorate in Hartford, CT, he was a founder and "the godfather" of a grass-roots community organization that mobilized low-income and minority constituencies. He also regularly addressed social justice issues as an Op-Ed columnist for the Hartford Courant.
Dr. Santmire outlined his own theology of nature in his book Nature Reborn: The Ecological and Cosmic Promise of Christian Theology (2000), in which he presents a "revisionist" testament of ecological theology, ranging through topics such as creation and cosmology, Christology and mission, spirituality and liturgy, ecological ethos and environmental ethics, and drawing on witnesses as diverse as Augustine and the classical Celtic saints, St. Francis and Luther, Martin Buber and John Muir.
Dr. Santmire's most recent book is Ritualizing Nature: Renewing Christian Liturgy in a Time of Crisis (2008), in which he explores Christian ritual as the matrix for the Christian community's renewed life with nature and with the poor of the earth. Dr. Santmire's Theological Autobiography appeared in Dialog 48:3 (Fall 2009), pp. 267-278.
Dr. Santmire graduated from Harvard College (1957) and the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia (1960), before completing his doctoral studies at Harvard Divinity School (1966), with a dissertation with systematic theologian Gordon Kaufman focusing on Karl Barth's theology of nature. He brought these learnings to bear in the wider church as a theological writer for the statements on the environment of the Lutheran Church in America (1972) and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (1983).
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