What Micheal Dowd, in a conversation with him, referred to as a “Come to Jesus moment about the climate”, I expect has been rthe experience of many over the past decade, and the frequency of those have probably plunged upward much like the Hockey Stick made famous by Climatologist Micheal Mann. I have certainly had such a conversion. It’s a whole new level and perspective, even outlook , on life as we know it today and how we envision the future. It has totally impacted the way I am looking at theology these days. I see a whole new instance and circumstance for human life just as the Biblical writers who employed the apocalyptic style saw a set of historical circumstances that radically altered their orientation toward the future. The Climate Crisis, it seems to me, is one such circumstance. Perhaps the most momentous, calamitous, far-reaching circumstance that represents an unprecedented challenge to human life and civilization.
And so my orientation toward the present and future (and the past as well) has changed in a dramatic way. It has had an intense impact on the shape of the calling I now perceive to be my role as a communicator and technologist, as well as a theologian. It is the reason why I have found it crucial for me to be in Claremont at Pomona College for the conference: “Seizing an Alternative: Toward an Ecological Civilization”, for I see that this can be a strategic time for those of us who know that the church MUST come alive to this challenge, in a way that again poses a challenge to the forces of empire that have now aligned with the forces of fossil fuel industries as what I can only name as an instance of those Principalities and Powers that Paul had in mind.
This theological vision has opened up a whole new room/vista into which I have walked. It is completely of a piece with what has gone before in my journey. And it makes all the sense in the world to me that I dove into Naomi Klein’s “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate” as soon as it came out, and had it open up for me this door that had stayed shut in my experience that was keeping me from letting it in to my perspective on time and The Kingdom of God. The kinds of life challenges we now face as human civilization are in dire need of the resources of the visions for human community contained in our Christian scriptures, and have been offered up by a host of other theological traditions and explorers of alternative forms of community.