[greenyes] Religion & the Environment

["Peter Anderson" <anderson@no.address>]

 Friday, April 22, 2005

Faithful join efforts toward conservation
By Dan Shapley
Poughkeepsie Journal



Nature is God's creation and gift -- a setting for spiritual enlightenment 
and contemplation that is temporarily in human stewardship.

For a growing number of the faithful, that notion is fueling a desire to 
fight for environmental protection, often in partnership with 
long-established environmental groups that had not before embraced a 
religious view of the natural world.

It also represents a new front in the national push-and-pull over the 
political term ''moral values'' -- a phrase associated with ideas such as 
right-to-life and traditional marriages. Environmental activism has 
typically been aligned with the more secular world of science.

''We each have to find a different language,'' said Sister Kathleen 
Donnelly, a Catholic nun of the Sisters of St. Ursula at the Linwood 
Spiritual Center in Rhinebeck. She also coordinates the Religious Orders 
Along the Hudson, a group of monasteries, churches and other religious land 
owners in the Hudson Valley concerned about good land stewardship.

''For the scientists to just stay with their measureable quantities, that's 
good information but it doesn't go far enough. For us to stay with our 
religious language, that's fine, but no one else understands it,'' Donnelly 
said. ''We have the same goals, if we talk long enough. We want the same 
healthy air, we want the same healthy water.''

There is evidence of the trend in the statements of national religious 
leaders of different faiths, in forums discussing the uniting of faith and 
science being planned locally and in the strategizing of environmentalists 
trying to protect and restore the Hudson River.

FOR FULL ARTICLE: 
http://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/today/frontpage/stories/fr042205s2_p.shtml



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