“When creation and humankind praise God together, they both experience their integral state, as opposed to the ‘less than fully natural’ state in which they are found now, so the universe is indeed the environment of our salvation (my emphasis).“
- MAXIMUS AND ECOLOGY by RADU BORDEIANU
“all the universe belongs to God, as the source of this gift, and we
humans, as priests of creation, are called to lift it up and offer it
back to God. The world thus becomes transparent to God’s
presence in it. God becomes all in all, even if not with the same
sacramental fullness as in the Eucharist. However, our attitude
towards creation should be as towards the Eucharist, to which we
show much attention and care, so that no minuscule crumb will
fall and be trampled upon or wasted. We should have the same
care for all the fragments of creation and thus put a stop to our
wasteful, careless, abusive, and consumerist attitudes, which have
caused and perpetuate the present ecological crisis. Of course, the
retrieval of a eucharistic attitude to creation, characteristic of
Maximus the Confessor and the early Christian Tradition, is not
sufficient: a structural change is also needed. These two aspects,
however, cannot be separated, since the present economic and
political structures reflect a consumerist mentality that goes
counter to the principles outlined by Maximus.”
- MAXIMUS AND ECOLOGY by RADU BORDEIANU
“When people cease to be surrounded by beauty, they cease to hope.”
N.T. Wright, Surprised By Hope, 231
Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.
- Martin Luther
“Let’s be serious: when you are in a creative endeavor, in that wonderful fever—‘My God, I’m onto something!’ and so on—happiness doesn’t enter it,” he says. “You are ready to suffer. Sometimes scientists, I read in a history of quantum physics… were even ready to take into account the possibility that they [would] die because of radiation. Happiness is, for me, an unethical category.” It’s also boring.
You can be happy without being moral. You can be happy without being interesting or engaged in the world around you. You can be happy without having a single creative idea or interest or passion. You can get everything you desire, and still not be happy. So why even focus on finding bliss?
From my friend’s blog: Learning To Wonder
“Who, after all, was it who didn’t want the dead to be raised? Not simply the intellectually timid or the rationalist. It was, and is, those in power, the social and intellectual tyrants and bullies; the Ceasars who would be threatened by a Lord of the world who had defeated the tyrant’s last weapon, death itself; the Herods who would be horrified at the postmortem validation of the true King of the Jews. And this is the point where believing in the ressurection of Jesus suddenly ceases to be a matter of inquiring about an odd event in the first century and becomes a matter of rediscovering hope in the twenty-first century. Hope is what you get when you suddenly realize that a different worldview is possible, a worldview in which the rich, the powerful, and the unscrupulous do not after all have the last word. The same worldview shfit that is demended by the ressurection of Jesus is the shift that will enable us to transform the world.”
N.T. Wright - Surprised By Hope, p. 75
Equating purchasing power with ethical superiority is dangerously similar to the ingrained societal notions that poverty is associated with, if not a direct result of, moral deficiency. As Ida Hammer of The Vegan Ideal writes, “It is simply assumed that affluent consumers make better choices because they are better people, not because of their class privilege. Likewise, poor consumers are assumed to make poor choices not because they lack access to better choices, but because they lack sufficient moral integrity.” In this way spending hundreds of dollars on a pair of stylish, polyvinyl boots which were manufactured by underpaid workers and shipped thousands of miles is viewed as morally superior to wearing a leather jacket salvaged from the garbage or fished out of the donation bin at a soup kitchen.
Defining veganism in terms of consumer practices means that the question of whether one supports or opposes industries which profit from the suffering of living, sentient beings, becomes reduced to a matter of what one does or does not eat, wear, or use as a cosmetic. The logic of consumer-centred veganism continues to break down from this point, as a greater degree of moral weight is assigned to what a person eats than what they purchase. For example, it is considered non-vegan for a person with limited funds to eat food containing animal products that they received from a food bank. On the other hand, it is considered within the parameters of veganism to purchase and eat foods which are cultivated by underpaid and abused workers in the global South, wrapped in gratuitous amounts of plastic packaging and transported to first-world consumers on cargo ships which use exorbitant amounts of oil and cause immense harm to sea life. Quinoa, soy, bananas, coconut, chocolate and coffee are just a few staples of the affluent first-world vegan diet which exemplify the conflation of eating ethically and being vegan.
http://www.iconoclastmedia.net/test/?q=Issue-32-Commodify-This
Interesting article with good points for thought.
“Put another way, irony doesn’t equate with whimsy, or playful misappropriations of popcult camp, or a thrift-store wardrobe; it is, far more distressingly and fundamentally, a category of spiritual disappointment—the grim yet also potentially absurd results when unintended consequences thoroughly trounce our conscious designs.”
