A group of 20 Muslim youths worked to clean up an area in Columbus as a community service event. The event helped one Columbus-area Muslim leader realize that demonstrating concern for the environment is not a luxury, but a necessity. Many people prioritize a number of worldly things ahead of environmental care. Increasingly, faith groups are demonstrating that environmental concern and care needs urgent attention throughout the world.
This year on April 22 for Earth Day, many organizations are working in conjunction with Metro Parks Officials to clean up five parks within the Columbus area. Leaders hope to encourage involvement of congregations within local communities. A day of services can be a great teaching moment as well as an opportunity to give back.
Bishop Campbell spoke to OSU students about Laudato Si', specifically regarding how Catholic tradition develops the context for it.
"Bishop Campbell highlighted four themes in his talk, including how Catholicism has considered nature for 2,000 years, a Catholic imagination of nature, historical trends of alienation from nature in the Western world, and a discussion of how sin – light and shadow of the world together – plays a role in our ecological situation."
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"As we head into the Thanksgiving holiday weekend in the United States, it’s great to think about all the things we can be grateful for. It is good to have a time to pause and reflect, to participate in the seasonality of gratitude for the year’s bountiful harvest, and to gather with family and friends. (We’ll ignore the über-consumerism of the day following Thanksgiving…)
Many of us probably know by now, however, that the story many of us learned in school about the first Thanksgiving is rather inaccurate at best, and racist and paternalistic in many ways, with a focus on the Manifest Destiny idea of the divine mandate for Europeans to conquer the “New World” in the name of Christ and country.
A few questions come to mind (at least my mind), for those of us with European-American roots, such as:
Should we even celebrate Thanksgiving, since it’s so tainted with colonialism?
What might it look like to “decolonize” our own understandings and our culture?
How can we do this work in a way that encourages our own folks to partner, rather than making them (our White brethren) feel further ostracized, but while also speaking real truth?
What can we do this Thanksgiving to begin to reconcile relationships damaged in the colonial era, both human to human and human to this land?"
Many scientists have warned that the earth is nearing overpopulation or has already reached its carrying capacity. Garret Hardin proposed the lifeboat ethics metaphor to address this crisis and proper resource distributions. Okyere-Manu comments that this metaphor does not take into account the African political and cultural worldview. Hardin's metaphor is also reliant on inequality which disproportionately affects vulnerable communities.
