Opening Words

Abstract

Life arising from death and destruction is Earth’s song of hope and God’s song of love. Hope and love are the food of life. In these pages we feast on both. First, however, we spend time with evil. We dare to recognize it, ferret out a few of its hiding places, and expose it. This is not the evil of intentional or willful cruelty. Rather, it is evil that inhabits our lives by virtue of the economic policies, practices, institutions, and assumptions that shape how we live. The “we” in this inquiry is the world’s small minority of extravagantly consuming people, especially those of us in the United States. Many of the movements and rhythms, the practices and products of our daily lives have destructive, even deadly impacts on countless impoverished people. Although we do not intend harm, our ways of life are killing people through climate change and through enslaving them in mines or plantations, poisoning their water or selling it on the global market, taking their land and homes, obliterating their fish supplies, and more. Moreover, through myriad forms of ecological degradation we are disrupting a fundamental quality of God’s garden—its life-generating capacity. We are uncreating. To repent of structural evil, we must recognize it. Morality and faith in God require recognizing haunting realities such as these named above and acknowledging our finely honed propensity to deny them. Yet the truth of our participation in structural evil is only a partial truth. Moral vision that recognizes structural evil has a second lens that sees signs of hope breaking through the volcanic wasteland of economic and ecological violence. Hope springs forth from the courage, tenacity, and creativity of people and movements in our own land, in India and Nigeria, in Mexico and the Maldives, and around the globe who are generating alternative practices, policies, institutions, and worldviews. This book will take the reader from the terrain of “what is” to this terrain of “what could be.” We will poke around in it, and find that “what could be” is, in fact, becoming. We will witness ordinary people from all walks of life forging paths toward sustainable Earth-human relations marked by justice. Moral vision has yet a third lens. It sees that human creatures are not alone in the move toward more just and sustainable ways of living. The sacred lifegiving and life-saving Source of the cosmos is with and within Earth’s creatures