These videos represent my final project for Theology of Ministry at Fordham University. Please do not share links to this subpage or to videos without permission.

In lieu of a written learning review, I received permission from Dr. Beaudoin to write and edit a few videos that draw on our course materials and can be of use to people discerning a vocation to creation care through EcoPhilly, the non-profit I co-coordinate. I present them here with brief remarks.

CARE FOR CREATION: IS IT GROUNDED IN OUR TRADITION?

In this video I draw on Dr. Beaudoin’s suggestion that our sense of the “care of souls” can be extended beyond human beings. How might this concept become practical for those who have not necessarily thought of themselves as ministers? I began with an invocation of childhood and went on to ground the sentiment of “care for creation” in Scripture (using one passage Dr. Beaudoin discusses, and a few others as well), sidestepping complex questions of the theology of ministry but evoking a Christian ethic of care.

CONSERVATION: A GROUND OF UNITY

While I personally value progressive policies over a tepid notion of political “compromise,” we have found how hard it is to make inroads on the issue of climate change in an archdiocese that is as generally conservative as Philadelphia is. Here, then, I propose areas where I genuinely believe there can be common ground (conservation, for instance); pivot from controversial talk of “climate” to a more empirical and less charged language of “extreme weather” and biodiversity loss; and explore other areas of overlap between “liberal” and “conservative” values. I cite and adapt a discussion of holy water in the video interview with Sister Miriam MacGillis as well as a discussion of agribusiness in McFarland Taylor’s book Green Sisters.

THE CHURCH AS CHANGE AGENT

In this video, I reach into our material for Week 6, drawing out some insights from Miles-Tribble’s Change Agent Church in Black Lives Matter Times: Urgency for Action and applying them to the work of climate activism. It was hard to capture the detail and complexity of her work in the brief video format I have chosen for this exercise.

GREEN SISTERS: AN INSPIRATION

In this video, I experimented with a “book review” form, although the main text is not my own; I read from the dust jacket of McFarland Taylor’s Green Sisters and cite her various examinations of women’s religious life in the title slide I present about half-way through.

A MEDITATION

This final video does not draw explicitly on our course materials — although those materials tipped me on to Thomas Berry, who serves as an inspiration for this meditation on our own responsibility. I also draw on Naomi Klein, who at the end of. her magisterial work This Changes Everything: Capitalism Versus the Climate suggests that we think of the sacred places in our own lives as an entry-point to larger-scale climate activism.