Earth-honoring Faith Religious Ethics in a New Key

Larry L. Rasmussen offers a dramatic new way of thinking about human society, ethics, and the health of our planet. Rejecting the modern ethical assumption that morality applies to human society alone, Earth-honoring Faith argues that we must derive a system of ethics and morality that accounts for the wellbeing of all creation on Earth, as well as the primal elements upon which it depends: earth, air, fire, water, and sunlight. Rasmussen shows that religious resources are essential in the difficult transition from an industrial-technological age to an ecological one. He advocates an alliance of spirituality and ecology, in which the requirements for planetary life are reconciled with the deep traditions of spirituality across religions -- mysticism, sacramentalism, asceticism, prophetic/liberative practices, and wisdom. These millennial, cross-cultural traditions are in need of their own conversion, however, if they are to be Earth-healing. Rasmussen poses critical questions: Are moral-spiritual traditions as we know them Earth-honoring or not? If not, how might they be? How might religious imagination expand the measure of the mind and heart in the service of planetary health? Who is leading the way? Rasmussen shows that by seeking to answer these questions, we can cease confining our moral views and daily habits to human society, instead placing them in the full community of earthly life. Joined to science and technology, religious ethics can find a new key for a new geological age: the Anthropocene. As Rasmussen demonstrates, fidelity to God can be lived more fully as fidelity to God and Earth.

Larry L. Rasmussen is Reinhold Niebuhr Professor Emeritus of Social Ethics, Union Theological Seminary and winner of the 1997 Grawemeyer Award in Religion. He is the author of Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Reality and Resistance and the co-editor of Earth Habitat: New Dimensions of Church and Community in Creation.