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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
As the ecological crisis, fuelled by widespread reality avoidance, deepens, so, fitfully and hesitantly, does the religious response. “Curiously, scientific analysis points toward the need for a quasireligious transformation of contemporary culture. Whether such a transformation can be achieved in time is problematic, to say the least”, writes Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich. Recent Christian reflection has concentrated on the human presence, the place and responsibility, within creation, of people under God. Fruitful discussion continues about metaphors and models for human dominion, such as stewardship, sacral kingship, co-worker, and co-operative letting be.
Other distinctively Christian questions are also being asked — and convincing answers demanded — that go right to the heart of the Christian religion, questions about Christ and the whole scientifically unfolding reality of life through geological history. We now realize that the cosmos is more immense than our ancestors in the faith imagined; and that our own species, redeemed in Christ and the conscious edge of evolution, is both more fragile and more vulnerable and, simultaneously, more damaging a presence within global and local ecosystems than we like to acknowledge. We are aware that there have been mass extinction events taking out whole ecosystems; in particular we are aware of the dinosaurs. Extinction events take their toll, especially through climate change and habitat loss, over millenia, even millions of years. We may be in such an extinction event in this our time, particularly in the decimation of flora and fauna including numerous insect species in the rainforests of the humid tropics.
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