This signal volume ends with four questions. They test its viability as an ambitious work in Christian ethics:
Exacting, demanding, far-reaching questions. And the answer is “Yes.”
That would seem accomplishment enough. But there is more. The questions are provoked by the greatest collective human challenge posed to date. Namely, how, on a hot, flat, changing, and crowded planet (seven—moving toward nine—billion of us, competing with the rest of the community of life) do we move from industrial-technological civilization to ecological civilization? How do we accomplish a durable future for the children, all the children, human and other-than-human? How do we do so as an unknown geological age, the Anthropocene, intrudes upon the age that has hosted all human civilizations and religions to date, the Holocene? And how do we do so when the global human economy of corporate capitalism collides with the very economy it is wholly dependent upon; namely, the economy of nature? How, to remember Jesus, do we fashion new wineskins (Luke 5:36-39), when all the forces say “The old is good” (Luke 5:39) and seek to get the very economy back on track that generates climate change and inaugurates the Anthropocene, the same economy that buries power and privilege so subtly in a way of life that it seems not only routine but the way things ought to be?
This is the world, and the necessary civilizational transition, that Cynthia Moe-Lobeda interrogates with relentless honesty and unflinching compassion; yes, with love. Fortunately, the result goes well beyond most treatises of our dilemmas and dead-ends. Hers is neither a jeremiad nor a facile program of voluntary individual lifestyle changes and upgrades (all of us driving Toyota Priuses to Home Depot or Lowe’s). Rather, she leads the reader to see the systemic evil of colossal structures that will only be changed as we are also changed. Transformation by another name, of both ourselves and the systems we live by.
And how is that done? Only by forces with the tenacity and strength of genuine faith in the possibility of a different way of life, this one attuned to all life and its parental, generative elements—earth (soil), air, fire (energy), and water. In short, attuned to creation and its claims upon our lives.
My response to the author and the book is gratitude. The times ahead will be neither comfortable nor easy. They are not for the faint of heart. Yet gratitude is the fitting response for a work in which the right questions and the right analysis are brought to the challenge we and future generations face: creating new wineskins for the new wine of a tough, new planet.
Larry Rasmussen
Reinhold Niebuhr Professor Emeritus of Social Ethics
Union Theological Seminary, New York City