Theology of the Land, 1985, Good Friday 2007
FACT: “farming” has morphed from its ethical, spiritual roots to become chemical “pharming”.
QUESTION: Where are the bishops, the Church, and the National Catholic Rural Life Conference in this unjust overreach (prostitution of agriculture) by the pharmaceutical (tobacco & petrochemical) industry?
Church, like people, loses perspective if it loses its sense of belonging in, with and to the community of nature. Vatican II inspired promising beginnings toward the renewal of Church and society. If theology calls for a communitarian society, then Church should model ethically, symbiotically, the communitarian society called for. Post Vatican II, Liberation theology pursued the communitarian renewal of Church and society. Where does the effort stand forty years later?
Pope Benedict XVI told a congregation at a Palm Sunday service that "earnings, success and career must not be the ultimate scope of life." He said that only those with "hands not soiled with corruption" could expect to reach God.
Sylvester L. Steffen
In 1985, the Virgil Michel Ecumenical Chair in Rural Social Ministries (St. John’s University, Collegeville, MN) and the National Catholic Rural Life Conference (Des Moines, IA) began an ongoing study of the “Theology of the Land”. Like all who attended the Conference, I came away encouraged and motivated to persevere in the compelling call of Vatican II. A distinguished panel articulated the “general dimensions of a new theology or ethic of land ownership and land use… LEONARD WEBER examines the economic philosophy that has shaped American attitudes toward property in general; he proposes alternative models and directions for socially responsible land ownership and use. WALTER BRUEGGEMANN explores the biblical covenantal relationship as a way for us to speak about land management. C. DEAN FREUDENBERGER addresses the implications of a new land ethic for the food and environmental crisis that has spread across the entire globe. JOHN HART offers the creation-focused spirituality and religious faith of Native American peoples as source for rethinking land ethics in America… RICHARD AUSTIN proposes the rebuilding of human relationships with the land in the context of environmental concerns and the rights inherent in the land.” [Co-Editor Bernard F. Evans, Chairman, Virgil Michel Chair; the other Co-Editor is Gregory D Cusack, then Director of the National Catholic Rural Life Conference (NCRLC).
Leonard Weber:
“…contemporary Americans do not really understand the American ethical heritage, and…the extent to which the heritage has shaped national policies…I read with interest and with much admiration ‘The Spirit of Earth’ (John Hart). Hart stressed that aspect of American heritage he sees converging with his own Christian theology of the land…he clearly acknowledges that his vision is at odds with the dominant American tradition…it is necessary to try to make clear why it is…that this vision is radical and morally unacceptable…It is my task to discuss the understanding of land-use ethics that is presently found in this country. This gives me the opportunity to describe the dominant American tradition as well as to reflect on alternative systems of social ethics…The land-use ethic that contemporary American society has intended is primarily an economic ethic. The value of land is determined almost exclusively by its role in the market system…land has no real value until it is ‘improved’ (John Locke)…when labor is mixed with it…The focus here is not so much on what I can claim for myself…It is to think more about our social obligations…A human rights starting point that recognizes social/economic rights as well as civil/political rights leads us to…responsibility toward others…What should be expected of business is that it is beneficial to society…I am suggesting…that we may want to make use of the evolving concept (Paul VI ‘Populorum Progressio’) of social responsibility within a framework of an emphasis on human rights…The concept might allow us to move away from emphasis on individual rights toward an emphasis on the common good.”
Walter Brueggemann:
“…Adam, that is, mankind, has a partner and mate, adamah, land. Humankind and land are thus linked in a covenantal relationship, analogous to the covenantal relationship between man and woman… unfortunately, in our society we have terribly distorted relationships between man and woman, between adam and adamah, distortions that combine promiscuity and domination.… Likely, we shall not correct one of these deadly distortions unless we correct them both. We shall not have a new land ethic until we have a new sexual ethic, free of both promiscuity and domination. Applied to land, we shall not have fertility until we have justice toward the land and toward those who depend on the land for life, which means all the brothers and sisters… It is clear that a land ethic that uses, abuses, and discards is a practice of pollution and fickleness. It creates a fundamental cleavage between a Creator who wills life and a creation that squanders and finally rejects life…”
C. Dean Freudenberger:
“…We are not free to do with the land as we please; rather we, created in God’s image, have been endowed with the responsibility for maintaining justice and righteousness within dominion. This requires the restoration and preservation of all the resources of the domain… Where humanity recognizes the collision course of its technosphere with the biosphere of its inheritance, pondering the issue of the theology of the land results in recognition of the need to shift from a human centeredness to a God centeredness.”
John Hart:
“…the congressional gavel hammers away treaties and pounds into dust their promises to Native Americans… Hovering in the background, benefiting from those gavels, are a handful of individuals and corporate controllers: this wealthy elite expects to profit from the poverty of the masses of displaced peoples of the land and to exercise greater political and economic power over the land, its fruit and its people… There is a crisis of ownership…there is a crisis of value…the attitude of greed is primarily an atheistic and anti-social perspective… for people of faith, a basic consideration between the prevailing profit ideology that elevates greed to a virtue and religious teachings that recognize greed as a vice and propose stewardship and sharing as virtues… Spirituality for native peoples is creation-focused, that is, there is a strong link, a deep sense of relationship, to the created world. Any concept of human superiority to, or domination over the rest of creation is foreign and repugnant… Change is possible, and the best hope for change is advocacy of justice by the churches. Church…must speak out for social change, and, through educational efforts and coalitions with groups able to work together on specific issues, create a better future… There must be a fundamental reform on land… Land must be used in such a way that it is carefully conserved and restored so that earth might regenerate herself and care for future generations of life forms that depend on her..”
Richard Cartwright Austin:
“My concern is rebuilding human relationships with the land. In the Bible I find a moral ecology—a vision of beautiful relationships between nature, humanity and the Lord… This biblical ecology involves the rescue of both humanity and land from oppression… In biblical tradition the Sabbath was more than a day of compulsory worship… Through the Sabbath tradition the Hebrews discovered design in relations between the Lord and the world, between humanity and nature, and within human society… The authors of Genesis understood the cycle of creative energy: work was not complete until there was rest, reflection, worship and celebration… For the first time in history…in the West… the majority of men and women do not work in direct contact with the land, the sea, or the species of natural life… Does the earth benefit from this reduced human presence? Not at all. We burden the earth even more than before… As society leaves the earth to machines, and the few people remaining are trained to think like machines, the earth suffers… Instead of ‘compulsory recreation’ I propose a human right of access to nature… The image of God in the biblical understanding implies a human vocation to express to nature, by our care for it, the justice and love of God… If we lose contact with God, we lose touch with the source of our life and with the beauty of transcendent justice and compassion… As the screws tighten, we will be pushed to exploit each other and to exploit land and environment ever more harshly. It is a wicked predicament for a once free people … Part of the answer is to reopen the frontier… a first step is to legislate that the holding of land by profit-seeking corporations is inherently inappropriate… their bottom-line nature forces them to regard land as a commodity and to exploit it… the human religious impulse [is] to see divinity in nature or through nature… We are called neither to worship or abuse nature, but to live creatively and productively with our fellow creatures… to tend and keep the earth as God would have it kept… Peace on earth includes sustainable ecological peace, peace among species, and peace with our natural environment."
[THEOLOGY OF THE LAND, Bernard F. Evans and Gregory D. Cusack, editors, 1987, The Liturgical Press, Collegeville, Mn. ISBN 0-8146-1554-6 Also: Monica R. Steffen, "Ethical Land Use", QUANTUM RELIGION (Sylvester L. Steffen) pp 212-223, www.authorhouse.com
The Farm Bill is before the
The Farm Bill is before the U.S. Legislature now. The world's really big issue is THE FUTURE OF AGRICULTURE AND FOOD SUSTAINABILITY: whether agriculture will be directed toward the irresponsible exploitation of land/nature in the pursuit of fuel, or whether toward responsible usage in the sustainable provisioning of food. Whither the future? Human destiny is at a crossroads as to ecological wasting. What’s our collective desire? To expend natural resources in order to fuel the machinery of exploitation or to use resources sensibly, sustainably, and secure network balances of life on Earth?
Monoculturing, the genetic modifications of organisms (GMO), and drug culture are artifices of “vertical integration”, of the corporatizing of life that protects profits for the few and unconscionably exploits nature and people. The diversity of Earth-life is fast being sacrificed on the altars of prostitution by the imposter wizards of corporate “religion”.
The genetic modification of plant and animal life is potentially with cataclysmic risks; the reason this is true is because biodiversity includes interdependent web-complexes at every step on the way to diversification. Just one “for instance”: honeybees! Honeybees are one of plant-life’s most prolific pollinators and of great importance, biologically and economically. In the bee’s life cycle, pollen is the critical food source for the hatched beelings and for the queen-mother bee.
The drug industry scheme of genetic engineering to make grain crops, soy beans, etc, compatible and “friendly” with systemic poisons, whether insecticides or herbicides, is at high risk, long-term, of modifying pollen in such a way that it becomes lethal to valuable insects that rely on pollen for food. Right now, beekeepers are finding that colonies of bees in massive numbers are dying off for no known reason. This could be an enormous and long-term economic disaster of incalculable proportions, not to mention the loss of a historically favored food. If GMO pollen is destroying pollinator insects, it poses colossal risks to life and disaster for global agricultural economics.
Essential relationships in life are issues of morality, of religion. The immorality of “abortion” is not a product of family planning so much as it is of the global culture of corporate profiteering and the acquiescence of institutional religions to corporate prostitution and overreach.
The appetites of the machinery of corporate technology for fuel are insatiable because private profit is their driving engine. At the present time, agriculture and land are at high risk of becoming victims of technology. The massive dedication of grain crops and land to corporate engineering (to produce fuel to power the engines of technology) is a new and worrying prospect with respect to the diversity of life on Earth, specifically for the reason that the bio-diverse organisms in the soil and plant-life diversity itself are being exposed to the sterilizing impacts of energy-intensive agriculture.
The global corporatization of agriculture has already put the balance of diverse Earth-life on a dangerously steep down-slope. Serious correctives are urgently needed to flatten the tilt against biodiversity and to prevent further greasing the slippery slope.
I apologize that this comment appeared on another venue; but the urgency of the issue is sufficiently timely that a repeat of it may be in order. Thank you.
INSTITUTIONAL RELIGIONS, AWAKEN TO YOUR PRO-LIFE RESPONSIBILITY.
PEOPLE, CONTACT YOUR SENATORS AND CONGRESSMEN/WOMEN NOW.
Dennis, thank you for
Dennis, thank you for posting the status-update on the National Catholic Rural Life Conference (NCRLC).
I am yet of one mind with Walter Brueggemann that an authentic theology of land isn’t possible except with an authentic theology of sex. Land justice is compromised when sex justice is — specifically with respect to the essential mutuality, complementarity and subsidiarity of female/male persons. The elitism of hierarchical Catholicism (male-dominant patriarchy) handicaps the Church and the National Catholic Rural Life Conference (NCRLC) because of Catholicism’s cultural fixation in male-sex elitism and institutional infallibilism; official Church fixation in these obtained until Vatican II, and continues now in praxis.
Vatican II had the effect of opening Church to Liberation Theology. In Latin Countries particularly, some political/economic/social theories of Karl Marx were involved in Church dialog because of the fact of the presence of active Communism in these countries. Burdensome cultural overreach of women and the marginalized continues systemically. Pope John Paul II feared risks of compromise from the dialog of Church with Communism, so he appointed bishops who shared his paranoia and who would disengage Church from dialog with Communism. His political animus targeted Liberation Theology, but it had its effect also on the politics and structure of the NCRLC, post 1985.
Before then, and under the leadership of Bishop Maurice J. Dingman (Des Moines Diocese) and Father Leonard Kayser, Acting Director of the NCRLC, its activities were ecumenical and non-sexist, in structure and philosophy. It is my sense that the philosophy and structure have changed since 1985, making the NCRLC more in tune with pre-Vatican II dominant (sexist) theology. While the NCRLC had been moving in more egalitarian grassroots directions, it has since, it seems to me, taken on a more dominating institutional character in leadership and personnel, and is less grassroots.
Post 1985, some former NCRLC people became active again in a new grassroots organization, the “Churches Center for Land and People” (CCLP). The focus of CCLP is grassroots, to work with churches (multi-denominational) and with people on-farm indiscriminately in engaging sustainable agriculture. The Dominican Sisters of Sinsinawa (Wisconsin) provided support and shelter in bringing this fledgling organization into existence. Its successes in large part are due to the earnest work of Sr. Miriam Brown, OP, and Charles Ryan, former Rural Life Director of the Des Moines Diocese under Bishop Dingman.
I mean not to discredit the continuing good works of the NCRLC, but I am of the opinion that its effectiveness is frustrated for the same reasons that institutional Catholicism is, namely, fixation in traditional elitism and dominion (male-dominated hierarchy and Episcopal heavy-handedness). I worry also that it collaborates with other institutions of unjust control over land and people, and by association with them fails in sensitivity for grassroots urgencies. Unethical corporate exploitation has come to crises proportions and continues to expand. It is unseemly and immoral for Church to be identified as one with other corporations of exploitation. Persistent institutional sexism frustrates communitarian authenticity and a just theology of sex and land.
Communitarian justice and land justice depend on a just theology of sex. Family is dysfunctional, society is dysfunctional, and Church is dysfunctional except for female/male mutuality, complementarity and subsidiarity. Words ring hollow when example belies them, and that is a problem for Church when it speaks disconnectedly from the people on issues of social justice. People simply turn off to church when it functions as an island unto itself — except institutions connect with the people they purport to serve, they are self-alienating. I trust that the NCRLC knows that it is more effective and credible when it identifies with and supports CCLP, and as it becomes more ecumenical and non-sexist in its politics and theology. I would like to know Brother Dave’s thoughts in this regard.
Tom Fox is doing a series of
Tom Fox is doing a series of podcasts on this very topic in his Food and Water Series:
A primer on the Farm Bill
Food. If you grow it, buy it or eat it, the Farm Bill affects you.
Watching over the food we eat
What does e-coli in our spinach tell us about our food systems?
Sacred food, economic meaning
Br. David Andrews talks with Tom Fox.
Dennis Coday, NCR cafe management
April 11, 2008 Subject:
April 11, 2008
Subject: WOMAN & LAND: “Bonded in Fruitfulness”
Most Reverend Ronald M. Gilmore,
President, National Catholic Rural Life Conference
Dear Bishop Gilmore:
Walter Brueggeman writes: “Adam, that is, mankind, has a partner and mate, adamah, land. Humankind and land are thus linked in a covenantal relationship, analogous to the covenantal relationship between man and woman …unfortunately, in our society we have terribly distorted relationships between man and woman, between adam and adamah, distortions that combine promiscuity and domination.… Likely, we shall not correct one of these deadly distortions unless we correct them both”. (“The Theology of Land”, Collegeville Press)
The human personality is male/ female characterized in roles of mutuality, complementarity and subsidiarity.
If Church is to be credible in the work for Land Justice, it must be credible in its work for Woman Justice.
The “Human Personality” is divided over male/ female characterization. This schism of the human personality is an urgent matter of religious/ cultural attention; it calls for dedicated collaboration by hierarchy and people alike, especially in these times of social/ environmental stress. I have called this matter to the attention of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI:
HUMAN PERSONALITY: E-Letter to Pope Benedict XVI, April 8, 2008
His Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI
Dear Holy Father:
In this day and age, professional ignorance of human biology/ psychology is unconscionable. From the perspective of neuro-biology, Faith represents the feminine person and Reason represents the masculine person; Faith and Reason, woman and man together, distinguish the human person in the harmony of emotional/ rational intelligence.
Scholastic science/ philosophy yet holds an understanding, with respect to female/ male harmony, that prevailed before the 1200s. The extrapolations of religion/ theology on that ancient understanding are misinformed and misguided, and continue to be humanly demeaning, socially disruptive and morally defective. I speak with respect to "Scholasticism's Blunder", that is, the discrediting of women, and "the other face", male super-arrogation.
I take no pleasure and find no consolation in bringing these matters to your attention. Yet, my conscience gives me no escape because of global malicious outcomes (e.g., social and eco-environmental wasting) I witness from the culpable ignorance also of religious professionals vis-a-vis the defective philosophy/ theology of female/ male relationships.
If I am mistaken in the facts (see the Appended Attachments below) and in the interpretation of the facts, it would serve Church well and God's People to be instructed as to the errors of misrepresentation.
Your attention to these matters is greatly appreciated and solicited. With respect and filial affection, I am,
Sylvester L. Steffen
"Scholasticism's Blunder" Posted Online at http://ncrcafe.org/node/1696
“The Other Face” Posted online at http://ncrcafe.org/node/1661
A related topic "Unsettled Religion, Unsettled Law" is posted at http://www.secondenlightenment.org/unsettled.pdf