In reviewing the book which is the subject of this article, the reviewer must decide where to begin: with the name of the book or the name of the author? An Inconvenient Purpose, about making godly energy choices, is written by Richard Gasaway.

So, what do you get when you cross Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and Pastor Rick Warren’s A Purpose-Driven Life? These are two major media phenomena which spoke to different, and largely-antagonistic, audiences. Gasaway’s answer is a book entitled An Inconvenient Purpose (WinePress 2009), an answer which proves that the Gore/Warren combination works.

You lovingly answer:

1. True, there are honest and expert climatologists who are climate change skeptics;
2. But, we live in a world of competing truth claims, and can’t abdicate our responsibility to measure those claims;
3. And, we should listen to the integrity and scientific rigor that has gone into climate change conclusions;
4. And, we should understand what scientists mean by the word “consensus,” and see that it’s being used in a valid way.

In 1949, before his Los Angeles crusade, Billy Graham was a young and unknown evangelist. According to the famous story, William Randolph Hearst was apparently looking for a spokesman for his conservative, even anti-communist, views. He sent a two-word directive to all his newspapers: “Puff Graham.” Years later, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that the success of Graham’s ministry owes more to the anointing of the Holy Spirit than to the weight of William Randolph Hearst. Nonetheless, in that mysterious way in which God uses human agency, Billy Graham’s evangelistic ministry was well launched.

Climate change caused by global warming provided a compelling context to engage engineering and ecology students in a semester-long, interdisciplinary, service/learning activity. We addressed three levels of inquiry throughout the semester: global, institutional, and personal.

When Heaven Meets Earth is the story of a faith-based approach to environmental stewardship in the watershed of the Chesapeake Bay. The film both tells a story but also models a faith-based approach to addressing environmental stewardship issues on the local level that could be instrumental in moving church congregation forward toward action. For those who are familiar with the earlier film, Between Heaven and Earth, this film incorporates that initial narrative but extends the story to include the outreach work of Tangier Island watermen who begin to build community upstream with Christian farmers whose farming practices impact the Chesapeake Bay and the livelihood of the watermen.

The Chesapeake Bay watershed stretches from New York to Virginia with the Bay itself boarding the densely populated area in the region around Washington, D.C.

I have been driven by my interest in the connection between community and land for some time, perhaps my entire life. I grew up in a Baptist home that was both evangelical and ecumenical. Because my father was a pastor, we lived in several small towns across the agricultural heartland of the Midwest United States. As I grew up, my questions relating to my faith were shaped by the context of the times--the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War—and my family’s theological grounding in Anabaptist thought. Thus, the issues that drove me up through my undergraduate studies were questions of how to build a just society that was at peace with itself.

Institutions of higher education are constituted through networks of particular, multiple, overlapping identities. In the paper we focus on the relationship between those identities and the possibilities for institutional change towards bringing sustainability on campus. In particular, we present Calvin College as one example or model of how these identities can provide resources for institutional change with respect to sustainability. First we will briefly outline the various identities, and then we will provide a number of examples of ‘greening the campus’ from our home institution, Calvin College, and show how Calvin’s various efforts at building campus sustainability draws on the strengths of those identities.

I’ve always been in frontline, evangelistic ministry – as a campus worker, a pastor, and a missionary. I even started out as a missionary kid. And now I find myself working with an evangelical Christian environmental organization. This is not where I thought I would be midway through my ministry career.

How Far From The Land Are We?

In Kenya and other “third world” countries, people live much closer to the land than we do in the USA. When I use the phrase “close to the land”, I don’t mean it to apply to where we live or how we spend some of our recreation hours.

What I mean is that the land, and the condition of the land, is as important to many people as your job is to you.