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Salvation of Soil

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Edward P. Echlin
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As soil organisms, people depend on other soil creatures. Biologist Thomas Lovejoy observed in a recent Reith Lecture, ‘All organisms need to eat. Even green plants which use the energy of the sun have to take in nutrients to live and grow.’ All earth creatures are an interdependent soil, or earth, community. While geological evidence shows that the community flourished before the arrival of humanity, people are not as expendable as ‘ecological age’ gaia gurus would have us believe. For especially through human hands and voices, and through sustainable cultivation, the soil community praises God in an ordered, biodiverse symphony. Sustainable horticulture in and near sustainable settlements provides a foretaste, a sign or parable, of God’s awaited kingdom.

Type
Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 82 , Issue 960 , February 2001 , pp. 88 - 93
Copyright
Copyright © 2001 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 John Macquame, On Being a Theologian, John H. Morgan, ed. (London, SCM, 1999), pp. 78-79.

2 In Robert Murray, The Image of God: Delegated and Responsible Authority, Priests & People, February 2000, p.53.

3 R.W. Southern, Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe, 2 Vols. (Oxford, Blackwell, 1998), Vol. I, p. 29.

4 John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew. Rethinking the Historical Jesus, 4 vols. (New York, Doubleday, 1991), Vol. I, p. 277.

5 Edward P. Ekhlin, Earth Spirituality, Jesus at the Centre (Alresford, Arthur James, 1991). pp. 54-61.

6 Walter Kasper, Hope in the final coming of Jesus Christ in Glory, Communio: An International Catholic Review, 12 (1985) p. 378.

7 Joseph Ratzinger, Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life, Michael Waldstein, trans., Aidan Nichols, ed. (Washington, Catholic University of America, 1988), p. 116.