Speaker says concern for environment important issue for Christianity

Published: 2004-05-12

NEW YORK (CNS) -- Concern for the environment is "not just one more issue in a string of good causes" for Christians but a basic part of their belief, a professor at Fordham University told a symposium on "The Abrahamic Religions and the Environmental Crisis." Speaking May 11 at the Interfaith Center of New York, Sister Elizabeth A. Johnson said "simple earthy things" such as bread and wine could become sacramental bearers of grace because the world with all its creatures "is the primordial sacrament." The earth is "charged with the grandeur of God," she said, quoting the English Jesuit poet Father Gerard Manley Hopkins. "Seen in this light, the goodness, beauty and holiness of creation that attracts our ecological care then becomes an intrinsic part of Christian belief, not something added on," she said. Sister Johnson, a Sister of St. Joseph, was joined by the Rev. Dieter Hessel, a Presbyterian leader of the ecological movement, in representing Christianity at the symposium. Judaism and Islam were each represented by two other scholars.

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