Customer Reviews:
 A theologian's view on prospects for the healing of the earth October 19, 2007
Jeremy Bevan (West Midlands, UK)
This is a major contribution from a prominent liberal feminist theologian, exploring the ways in which strands of the Judeo-Christian tradition might be brought into harmony with a holistic understanding of our place on the earth. Starting with an analysis of the Judeo-Christian creation story, compared with Greek and Babylonian ones, Radford Ruether critiques the way the three traditions fail, for different reasons, to truly connect humankind with the earth. Though she holds out some hope that science may develop a new creation-story of its own to help restore the connection, the author nonetheless criticises what she calls science's fact/value split as inherently likely to impede this. Looking next at how some (at least) of the responsibility for the current ecological crisis can be traced back to Judeo-Christian narratives of domination (Genesis 1), Radford Ruether ends with accounts of how the covenantal and sacramental Christian traditions might be used to help restore a right, and suitably humble, `re-insertion' of humanity into an earth-centred frame of reference. The latter is, to my mind, much the more successful account, since the covenantal tradition (at least as Radford Ruether conceives it) remains very human-centred. The author's final chapter, on the need for political action, is now looking somewhat dated (it was written in 1992) - but perhaps this is partly because so much of what she advocates is already becoming fairly 'mainstream'.
|
