Redeeming
the Time
"The connection
between destitute persons and diminished ecosystems
is increasingly being made in Southern nations. As Eduardo Gudynas,
coordinator of environment and development in the Franciscan
Ecological Center (CIPPE) in Montevideo, Uruguay, points out, 44
percent of Latin America, 181 million people, lives in poverty,
half of those in extreme poverty."1a
"Overall, liberation
theology demonstrates dynamically that ecological
concerns run along the fault lines of society -- economic
disparity, political oppression, systemic racism. Ecological
destruction follows these fault lines and must be understood,
liberation theologians argue, within the social structures of oppression
and liberation that social analysis has illuminated.
Moreover, in their reading of the gospel, liberation theologians
argue that the church, when confronted with economic,
social, political, or racial oppression, cannot remain neutral;
it must take sides on behalf of the vulnerable, weak, and
threatened. When these vulnerable elements turn out to be
plants, nonhuman animals, and ecosystems, the church must also
rise to their defense."1b
"Building on
this notion of a person-in-community paradigm that
integrates concepts of the individual and collective, a political
theology of the environment offers not an "anthropocentric"
approach but rather an "anthro-harmonic"
understanding of the human-nonhuman relationship. . . An
anthro-harmonic perspective acknowledges the importance of the
human and makes the human fundamental but not exclusively
focal."1c
"When one looks
at environmental destruction from a political-theological
perspective, one witnesses a dual oppression, both of the poor
and of vulnerable natural ecosystems."1d
|
|
*
I
am grateful to Jennifer Allison for introducing me to the works
of Professor Stephen B. Scharper.
1 Stephen Bede
Scharper. Redeeming the Time: A
Political Theology of the Environment. Stephen Bede
Scharper, 1997. New York, NY: The Continuum Publishing Company,
1998.
a Liberation Theology: The Greening of
Solidarity, p. 167.
b Ibid., p. 183.
c Contouring a Political Theology of the Environment,
p. 188.
d Ibid., p. 190.
MK-BOOKS-SCHARPER-20010511
|
|