Interfaith Power and Light

At a banquet last night calling the religious community to take the lead in the struggle to maintain a healthy planet earth, I took the following pictures of some of the Phoenix area religious leaders:






I was invited to share a few sentences about the Christian tradition's commitment to care for the environment. Here is what I said:
"One of the fundaments, if not the fundament, of Western Law is the right to own or to possess. When the law is built to support such a principle, remarkably it justifies the genocide of a people seen as an impediment to the desire to own a land to which the people belong. The Christian tradition offers some words as a corrective to that. The first are these from Jesus: "the whole law can be summed up in this, that you love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength - and your neighbor as yourself:" reminding us that if the law is to support God's vision of Shalom, then it will be based not on our right to possess but our capacity to love. The second is this rubric from the Psalms: "The Earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof."