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From Arbor Day to the Environmental Sabbath: Nature, Liturgy, and American Protestantism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2011

Leigh Eric Schmidt
Leigh Eric Schmidt
Affiliation:
Drew University
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Extract

In the past two decades considerable theological energy has been expended in the construction of various ecological theologies and spiritualities. Process theologians, ecofeminists, and theologians of creation, earth, nature, ecology, and land have been elucidating religious perspectives that they hope will help transform human attitudes toward nature and the environment. These writers have sought to reorient Christianity away from anthropocentric views that claim human dominion over nature, premillennial expectations that embrace the destruction of this world, soteriological preoccupations that focus on individual salvation, and otherworldly assumptions that foster alienation from the earth and nature. Some sanguine observers have seen this recent ferment as the greening of American theology or even the greening of the American churches. At the same time, intellectual historians have paid increasing attention to the history of Western ideas about nature and have debated at length the impact of Christianity's theological heritage on the environmental crisis. Specifically, a number of historians have constructed a genealogy of American conservationist and preservationist thought by tracing out a line that includes, among others, George Catlin, Henry David Thoreau, George Perkins Marsh, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and Rachel Carson.

Type
Research Article
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 84 , Issue 3 , July 1991 , pp. 299 - 323
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1991

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References

1 Despite the reservations of the editors, I have continued to use “American” in this article as an adjective denoting the United States. The possible alternative of using “North American” would suggest that Canadian Protestantism is included in this article's analysis, which is not the case.

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48 Fred Winslow Adams, “A Church Calendar Year Modelled on the Historic Christian Year,” in Federal Council of Churches, Committee on Worship, Minutes, 9 May 1935, Appendix A. Adams had a keen sense of nature, liturgy, and seasonal rhythms evident in his draft proposal calling for a Summertide and a Harvesttide, both of which were rejected by members of the larger Committee who encouraged “the lessening of emphasis upon the seasons of Nature's year.” See Federal Council of Churches, Committee on Worship, Minutes, 12 Nov. 1935.

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89 lbid.

90 The Christian Year (2d ed.) 5.