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Title: Earth-honoring Faith

Subtitle: Religious Ethics in a New Key

Author: Larry L. Rasmussen

Narrator: Mark Cabus

Format: Unabridged

Length: 19 hrs and 15 mins

Language: English

Release date: 12-17-13

Publisher: Audible Studios

Ratings: 4.5 of 5 out of 2 votes

Genres: Science & Technology, Environment

Publisher's Summary:

Thoughtful observers agree that the planetary crisis we now face - climate change; species extinction; the destruction of entire ecosystems; the urgent need for a more just economic-political order - is pushing human civilization to a radical turning point: change or perish. But precisely how to change remains an open question.

In Earth-honoring Faith, Larry Rasmussen answers that question with a dramatically new way of thinking about human society, ethics, and the ongoing health of our planet. Rejecting the modern assumption that morality applies to human society alone, Rasmussen insists that we must derive a spiritual and ecological ethic that accounts for the well-being of all creation, as well as the primal elements upon which it depends: earth, air, fire, water, and sunlight. He argues that good science, necessary as it is, will not be enough to inspire fundamental change. We must draw on religious resources as well to make the difficult transition from an industrial-technological age obsessed with consumption to an ecological age that restores wise stewardship of all life.

Earth-honoring Faith advocates an alliance of spirituality and ecology, in which the material requirements for planetary life are reconciled with deep traditions of spirituality across religions, traditions that include mysticism, sacramentalism, prophetic practices, asceticism, and the cultivation of wisdom. It is these shared spiritual practices that can produce a chorus of world faiths to counter the consumerism, utilitarianism, alienation, oppression, and folly that have pushed us to the brink.

Written with passionate commitment and deep insight, Earth-honoring Faith reminds us that we must live in the present with the knowledge that the eyes of future generations will look back at us.

Members Reviews:

A Treasure of Wisdom and Understanding

Earth-honoring Faith is a complex and far-ranging book. I, a theology student, have read through it once, read certain parts a second time, and studied other parts. Still I have not yet begun to mine the riches that the book offers to us human inhabitants of planet earth. I have much work yet to do with this book. But still for those who would read through it only once or even those who would use it merely for reference (the index is fairly good), it is an excellent resource.

In his earlier book, Earth Community Earth Ethics (1996) Rasmussen set down his vital thesis: namely, that we are part of a larger community-the Earth Community, and we must live accordingly-Earth Ethics. In Earth-honoring Faith, he develops this thesis further, accessing multiple sources, religious, scientific, popular, and otherwise. Like the prophets of old, Rasmussen sees the manifold ecological dangers that, given our current worldview and way of life, are lurking on the horizon, and he urgently calls us to engage in the prodigious task of "a seismic shift in [our] moral universe and in our industrial/postindustrial way of life. It is a shift from the encapsulated human self and human society to the ecosphere as center, boundary, and subject; from human justice to creation justice; and from my bounded human community to the unbounded community of all life" (p. 193). We must undertake "the re-moralization of the landscape (deBuys) . . . the collective religious and cultural task as people struggle to find a new identity while caught in the throes of death and renewal.