“Spirituality, stewardship and justice are key criteria proposed by Harper to green our faith traditions and pulpits--a most urgent task in our times. Valuable both as an introduction and to help us deepen our commitments to faith and the environment.”
--Dr. Guillermo Kerber, Programme Executive for Care for Creation and Climate Justice, World Council of Churches, Geneva, Switzerland

In this book Fletcher Harper takes on the noble and critical task of inspiring and motivating the faith community to take action in caring for God’s creation. He challenges stereotypes about the Bible and Christian theology in regard to its message about nature, and he explores many of the world’s major faith traditions for significant practices and teachings on the environment. He shares meaningful stories from his work with GreenFaith that provide a window onto humankind’s troubled relationship to the natural world. This book contributes to a growing body of work that shows the religious and spiritual element of the ecological crisis, and the importance of the faith community’s involvement in solving difficult environmental issues. Those who are seeking spiritual depth while wondering about the future of the planet – whether they are members of a faith community or not – will benefit immensely from taking the time to read this book and consider another narrative about the role of faith in ecological ethics.

-Rev. Dr. Daniel R. Smith, Lutheran Church of the Incarnation in Davis, CA

…The very first thing that God asks of those of us in the Judeo-Christian tradition is to exercise dominion over this earth, to dress and to keep it. Our dominion so far has been a pretty sorry affair: we’re turning the generally benign order of the Holocene into overheated chaos. It’s the great adventure of our time to try and reconnect with the world around us, and to do it with sufficient speed to save as much of the DNA around us as we can. But it requires our species learning how to fit in to the larger whole, which is precisely the task we were assigned in Genesis 1. This slim volume is a handbook for starting that process—for the inquiry we need to undertake if we’re going to be the people we’ve been called to be. If ever there was a book for its moment in time, this is it.

-Bill McKibben, Schumann Distinguished Scholar, Middlebury College from the foreword