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.

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