A few months ago at the public library in Evansville, Indiana, 125 people gathered for a program about building backyard bird habitats, complete with hundreds of photos of warblers and other songbirds, all taken in the presenter’s own yard. She emphasized the need for local and migratory birds to find water, food, and shelter at […]
A majority of citizens in all 50 states supports continued U.S. participation in the 2015 Paris climate accord,as this Yale research on American opinion shows. About half of Trump supporters do as well. But not the White House. Last Thursday afternoon President Trump announced thathe will begin the process of withdrawing the U.S.from the historic […]
Collaboration–what a concept in the nonstop world of competitive partisanship, where millions are spent promoting one message, one candidate, one worldview over against another, while children skip meals. The day before the crashing finale of the most disturbing presidential race ever, “bipartisan” seems pretty remote. But it is happening in some places. Groups like the Friends […]
May must be Audio Month. On the same day I gave one of the Spirit Is Willing webinars with Georgia Interfaith Power & Light, I also had a radio interview with the Rev. John Shuck, who hosts Progressive Spirit on KBOO Community Radio out of Portland, Oregon, a show that has hosted the likes of Jim […]
Do you recall the recession, when banks got a big bailout and a dubious public was told that otherwise the whole thing would collapse? Do you rememberthe contradictory messages: so many people in debt up to their eyeballs being told they needed to spend the country’s way out of recession? Does it hurt your stomach […]
Back in Lima the next day, we attended the Interfaith Commission Conference on Climate Change, featuring American economistJeffrey Sachs. Sachs talked about the history of industrialization that arose with the power of fossil fuels beginning 250 years ago with the steam engine, which changed the world in every way. Intensive industrialization arose. The population exploded. […]
We drove another 75 miles that night to Huancayo, the capital of Junin province, a city of around 350,000 ten times La Oroya’s size, and just a little lower in altitude. We stayed on the main street—my window faced the huge dome of Huancayo Cathedral, and the music and car horns continued well into the […]
On our first morning in Lima, Ruth Farrell took us on an epic walk to the Pacific coast, which was almost as far down as it was to our west. She needn’t have told us that she lost her way as we returned—we wouldn’t have known, and we were happy to roam in the warm […]
COP 20, the twentieth meeting of the UN “Conference of the Parties,” to clarify worldwide agreements for action against climate change, occurred in Lima, Peru the first half of December. There a proposal was drafted to be filled in by each nation and then ratified at COP 21 in Paris next year. This sounds, like most […]
A new report entitled “Believers, Sympathizers, and Skeptics: Why Americans Are Conflicted about Climate Change, Environmental Policy, and Science” offers very interesting statistics on American views of climate change. Jointly prepared by the Public Religion Research Institute and the American Academy of Religion, it highlights views by political and religious affiliation. Among many other things, it discusses […]