Environmental Ethics: Some Challenges for Christians
—Beckley, The Annual: Society of Christian Ethics 1993

"Environmental Ethics: Some Challenges for Christians." In Harlan Beckley, ed., The Annual: Society of Christian Ethics (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 1993), pages 163-186. Online at: http://hdl.handle.net/10217/40511

The Christian ethics for persons, calling for love, justice, benevolence, and compassion does not transfer easily to duties toward wildlife, and the difficulties compound with an ethic toward plants, species, and ecosystems. Biblical faith began with a land ethic, a covenanted promised land, and Christians find a nature that is sacred and good in itself, regardless of its human utility. Earth is a planet with promise, nature is graced with creativity. Nature is also cruciform, death is perpetually redeemed with the renewal of life, and central themes in Christianity are congenial to an environmental ethic.

Reprinted in Church and Society, July/August 1996, pages 37-50.

Reprinted in The Egg: An Eco-Justice Quarterly (Environmental Justice Working Group of the National Council of Churches) vol. 13, no. 3 (summer 1993):6-10, 18. Keynote address at the Society of Christian Ethics, Annual National Conference, Savannah, GA, January 8-10, 1993.