The United States and the G8 rich nations refuse to commit to carbon targets to halt a global temperature rise of 2 degrees Celsius. If the temperature rises 2 degrees the Greenland ice cap would melt, the ocean would rise several feet, and the Maldives nation in the Indian Ocean, consisting of islands barely above sea level, would be flooded out of existence.
In a most politically incorrect satire on the status of the Emperor and the High Priest, Jesus said that children are the “greatest in Heaven’s domain.” Matt. 18:4.
The president of Indiana University while I was in graduate school was Herman B Wells. He was, it seemed, a jolly fellow, whose belly jiggled when he laughed like a bowl full of jelly. His middle initial, not having a period, reminded me of my grandpa. Lacking a middle name given by parents, grandpa choose “A” instead, representing, I assume, high quality.
Last Friday, a lucky 13th, I attended my 61st high school reunion. For that gathering I produced a book, 49ers Roar: Stories of Leo High School Classmates, with a lion on the cover. For several weeks up to that meeting I lived in both 1949 and 2010, and in both Indiana and Illinois.
In Aramaic-speaking Galilee, people did not ask Jesus if Allaha (translated God) existed. Allaha means The One, a reality as apparent to Galileeans as the singular energy of a horse between the thighs of a rider.
A Yupik Eskimo elder named Chester didn’t know what money was when he was ten years old. He grew up hunting fish, seals, reindeer, and walruses, and that suited him fine. “People would do things together….one hand, one heart, one thought, one mind.” Chester lives in Savoonga, a small community of 700 on a fly-speck Alaskan island close to Siberia.
An eco-spirituality writer who grew up on Second Coming theology, Brenda Peterson, has just published a book sparkling with humor about life and family in an autobiography, I Want to be Left Behind: Finding Rapture Here on Earth.
Jesus said, “Blessed are the peacemakers.” If he were walking among us today, he would say, “Blessed are the bonobo peacemakers,” as I discuss in chapter 5 of my book, Green Kingdom Come!
I was born in Ohio in 1931, where the most spectacular extinction episode imaginable had come to a horrid end only 17 years earlier in the Cincinnati Zoo. In 1800 there were 5 billion passenger pigeons in the United States, and in 1914 there were zero. Many pigeons died in planned slaughters.
