November 2007 issue – “Imagining a healed world”
Posted by stimulusjournal on November 19, 2007
Christians in the twenty-first Century need to heed especially the call to a renewed inner relationship with the natural world, and to resist the cultural mandate to control. As one phenomenologist has said, “The idea of a universe that is selfsubsistent – standing entirely on its own, fully operational and intelligible, independent of anything outside itself – is both odd and modern.” If Christians retreat to an other-worldly preoccupation it does no good to ourselves or the world.
The core papers presented in this issue of Stimulus are from a one-day Colloquium on Creation Care at Bible College, Henderson, on May 22nd. This Colloquium was jointly sponsored by A Rocha, an emerging Christian environmental organisation now affiliated with A Rocha International, and TANSA (Theology and the Natural Sciences in Aotearoa), a centre for science and faith dialogue within the Tyndale/ Carey Graduate School, partly funded by Metanexus.net.
Gavin said
I have two grumbles about the otherwise excellent November issue. The first is the heavy promotion of an upcoming critique of Lloyd Geering’s work (page 25). I’m not a Geering groupie, but did find the treatment dished out by the recent Otago University publication devoid of balance and graciousness. Now we are going to get yet another dose from Kai Man Kwan – one of the contributors to that volume. Will Stimulus, unlike the book editors, give Geering a chance to respond, or is it just another beat-up. Even worse, this apparent bias is being actively marketed as something special!
Grumble 2: a testy piece on Bishop Spong by the publisher. I went along to hear the bishop too, and came away with a much less defensive take on the matter. Again, little effort for balance and a truck load of denial. When we’re prepared to abandon the automatic spasms of knee-jerking maybe we’ll gain a little more credibility with the “real world” out there.