Mistaken predictions
Prophets proclaim the truth, and they predict the future only in a derivative sense of cautioning about the consequences of denying the truth.
Prophets proclaim the truth, and they predict the future only in a derivative sense of cautioning about the consequences of denying the truth.
There is a fundamental precept among climate change activists and radical environmentalists that man is an interloper in the natural world. All would be pristine if it weren't for us.
Pope Francis's encyclical on the environment, "Laudato Si", was, even before its publication this week, being drawn into the usual partisan divisions.
We were expecting something big from Pope Francis: something controversial, something that carried a heavy political charge. What he has given us is something bigger.
It's integration that he proposes — God and man, the rich and the poor, the natural world with the world of work and industry.
In the public square, Christianity has often been mischaracterized in the environmental debate.
The pronouncements of Popes John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis about the environment are challenging, even counter-cultural.
In the beginning, there was a glade. A green and foresty place, a meadowy clearing in the great big woods. The robins called from branch to branch. A laughing stream wove gently through the dell. A rabbit hopped through the long grass, bright with morning dew. All was well, and all manner of things were well until, one day, the evil came.
Perhaps it is just an unhappy irony that one of the most hallowed days on the environmental activists calendar, last months Earth Day, falls so uncomfortably close to the much less covered Malaria Day.
What is the proper Christian view toward "animal rights?" That depends on how one defines the term.