Join Rev. Rachel Field for an exploration of An Episcopal Path to Creation Justice (the Path). During this webinar we will hear the story of how the Path came into being as well as learn how to organize volunteers for adapting and hosting this program at your home diocese and even in your parish. We will get a taste for how the process works for parishes involved in the Path and will depart with a deeper understanding of our own creation care ministry landscapes.
The Rev. Rachel Field comes to Creation Care work having spent most of her life in the tidal flats of the eastern shore of Maryland where the blue crabs and herons captivated her attention. That awe and fascination with the world led her to deeper questions about God, and eventually encouraged her to shape a life close to the land here in Vermont. She has worked with Mission Farm in Vermont, the Church of the Woods in New Hampshire, the Retreat House at Hillsboro, and as a Region Missionary for the Episcopal Church in Connecticut. Her work focuses on building emerging ministries and networks. She is currently an experiment manager for Try Tank and the Owner/Co-Director of Heartberry Hollow Farm & Forest, which is a regenerative farm and retreat center in central Vermont. Rachel is the Project Coordinator for An Episcopal Path to Creation Justice.
The Rev. Jerry Cappel will be hosting an evening online course, Deep Green Faith: Aligning Faith and Practice on Monday nights, 7:30 pm eastern time. The course is hosted on Bexley Seabury Pathways for Baptismal Living course site.
This 5-session online course explores ways individuals and churches can expand creation care beyond committee actions, material stewardship, and personal life adjustments, onto a more integrated expression of faith and whole church life. How might faith communities embody and bear witness to the inclusion of all creation in their lives of faith, worship, and witness? How can their choices and practices better express a gospel that welcomes and heals all creation?
Participants will explore these questions in terms of: bible and theology, prayer and worship, community and hospitality, and witness and service.
Rev. Cappel is the Director for the Center of Deep Green Faith and the Environmental Network Coordinator for Province IV of The Episcopal Church.
Tuition for this course is $200.
This short course focuses on dirt: how important it is in the Bible; how all of us are already in relationship to dirt; and how our discipleship can take responsibility for dirt. The class includes readings, lectures, conversations, and exercises in prayerful dirt discernment. This is an online course that will be delivered through the Zoom platform.
Four Sessions
Time: 7:30 ET/6:30 CT
May 4: The place and importance of dirt in discipleship
May 11: Dirt stories in the Bible
May 18: Re-theologizing dirt
May 25: Dirt practice
Course Instructor: Dr. Cornell is Office of the Provost-Candler School of Theology Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at Emory University.
The tuition is $105.00 to be paid at the link provided in your confirmation email!
The Center is committed to helping all those interested in the course to be able to enroll regardless of their financial circumstances. If you can afford to pay more than the tuition, please consider making an additional contribution here to help defray the cost for those only able to pay less. If your financial situation is such that you need financial aid, please download this form to be emailed to the course instructor.
We’ll explore the biological concept of refugia, that is, habitats where life persists in the midst of extreme disturbance. Taking our cue from nature’s resilience strategies, we’ll consider how people of faith might become people of refugia, not only in the natural world but in cultural and spiritual contexts as well. We will look to the refugia model as a way forward in a time of crisis, a way that avoids both doomism and empty optimism, but instead provides opportunity for deep transformation.
Debra Rienstra is professor of English at Calvin University. Her most recent book is Refugia Faith: Seeking Hidden Shelters, Ordinary Wonders, and the Healing of the Earth (Fortress 2022). Rienstra is also the host of the Refugia Podcast and writes bi-weekly for The Reformed Journal.
What does faithfulness look like when creation itself is threatened? The climate crisis presents humanity with an unprecedented opportunity to respond. The Rev. Dr. Jim Antal will provide an update on the crisis, and share some of the many ways churches and other faith communities can get involved, including joining Bill McKibben’s new organization, Third Act.
Jim Antal serves as Special Advisor on Climate Justice to the General Minister and President of the United Church of Christ. Antal’s book, CLIMATE CHURCH, CLIMATE WORLD, just released in a revised and updated 2nd edition, is being read by hundreds of churches. From 2006-2018, Antal led the 350 UCC churches in Massachusetts as their Conference Minister and President. He has preached on climate change since 1988 in over 400 settings and has engaged in non-violent civil disobedience on numerous occasions.
In a time of environmental turmoil and eco-anxiety, communal contemplative practice can sacralize and enliven practical church efforts to foster love for, and responsible living on, Earth. Join Payton Hoegh, Program Director of the Center for Spirituality in Nature, to explore how mindful small-group engagement in and with the natural world regrounds faith, rekindles hope, and renews commitment to ecological faith. This webinar will offer practical tools and resources for community practice of spirituality in nature with particular focus on its application for congregational “Green Teams” and Creation Care committees.
Payton Hoegh is a postulant for Holy Orders in the Diocese of Los Angeles. Since discerning a call to ordination in 2017, Payton’s ministry has centered on creation care, contemplative practice, and the creation of alternative spaces for spiritual engagement and community weaving–particularly in and with the natural world. He is the program director of the Center for Spirituality in Nature, founder and guide of All Wanderers, a contemplative spiritual community, and author of two sessions of the Episcopal Church’s forthcoming Creation Care curriculum, Love God, Love God’s World. Payton holds a master of divinity degree from the Claremont School of Theology.
The landscape designer Benjamin Vogt describes his work turning yards into prairies as “reconciliation ecology.” From a theological perspective, this work is both peacemaking with the land to which we have done violence and a recovery of the original human vocation given in Genesis 2:15 to “serve (avad) and preserve (shamar) the garden.” This workshop will move from the theological to the practical, providing participants with concrete next steps for working where they live and worship to make peace with the land. We’ll identify local resources for understanding the ecology of our place, sourcing native plants, and a rough design schema for how a church could install a native plant landscape over a year’s time.
Ragan Sutterfield is a priest in the Episcopal Church and serves a parish in his native Arkansas. Ragan's writing and interests are focused at the intersection of faith and ecology where he brings his background in birding, permaculture, and soil ecology into conversation with philosophy, theology, and the Christian spiritual tradition. His writing has appeared in a variety of places including The Christian Century, Sojourners, The Oxford American, Plough Online, and The Englewood Review of Books. Ragan is the author of Wendell Berry and the Given Life (Franciscan Media), This is My Body (Convergent/Random House), Cultivating Reality (Cascade), and the small collection of essays Farming as a Spiritual Discipline. In a project funded by the Louisville Institute, Ragan is now at work on a book exploring humus and humility, soil science and Christian spirituality. Ragan seeks to live the good life with his wife Emily and daughters Lillian and Lucia. You can find out more about his work at ragansutterfield.com.
Tune in to a lively discussion about how two faith communities are developing Deep Green Faith initiatives in two different and important dimensions - Formation and Sustainability! In this presentation and discussion, you will learn some great ideas for deep green formation programs for all ages you can try now. Find out how one community is successfully adopting sustainability initiatives in their church community while another is promoting spiritual formation practices that highlight our faith connection to the creation.
Join Navi Hawkins and Rodney Scott from St. Peter's Episcopal Church in Greenville SC, and Martha Meyer and Reenie Ruckdaeschel from St. Luke's Episcopal Church in Evanston IL, together with Allison Ashley from St. Mark’s in Evanston, as they share ideas from their experience and provide some much-needed hope!
In the Gospel according to Mark, the risen Jesus commands his disciples to "proclaim the good news to the whole creation." What is the significance of the Resurrection for non-human creation? How do these narratives speak to discipleship in the present age of climate crisis and ecological fracture?
Join Deep Green Faith for an Eastertide presentation and conversation about the implications of Christ's risen body not just for the whole of humanity, but for the whole of the created world.
The Rev. Phil Hooper serves as Associate Rector of Trinity Episcopal Church in Fort Wayne, Indiana and is a member of the Creation Care Commission for the Diocese of Northern Indiana. He is a contributing author and speaker for variety of projects throughout The Episcopal Church. He has recently joined Deep Green Faith's leadership efforts after completing the Center's yearlong Contemplation & Care for Creation certificate program.
How can those engaged in ministries of Creation Care find grounding and confidence from the first three chapters of Genesis? What does Genesis teach about our human relationship to the rest of creation?
This webinar explores several of the basic themes and challenges from the creation stories in Genesis chapters 1-3, such as: Creation and Sabbath, Bearing the Image of God, Dominion and Stewardship and The Tree of Knowledge.
The Rev. Jerry Cappel is an ordained Episcopal priest currently serving as the Director of the Center for Deep Green Faith. He also serves as the Environmental Network Coordinator for Province IV of The Episcopal Church. Rev. Cappel has a Ph.D. in religious education and over twenty years of experience in corporate training and development. He has worked as an author and editor of youth and adult education materials for Smyth & Helwys Publishing in Macon, GA and Church Publishing in New York.
In this webinar, Dr. Collin Cornell explores the importance of dirt—in the Bible, in our Christian imagination, and in our practice of discipleship. Come join us as we explore the both the ground and the ground of our being.
Dr. Cornell is Office of the Provost-Candler School of Theology Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow, Emory University.
The Eucharist, a gospel sacrament and central feature of life in the Christian church, also holds “green” significance for our faith practice today. But it’s a coloring of the sacramental rite we may not often recognize. This webinar aims to highlight those less-noticed features of classic eucharistic liturgy that already embody a vital, transformational vision of engagement with the fullness of God’s creation. In this light the eucharistic feast enacts not only the believer’s communion with God in Christ, but also the inherently ecological principle of interchange among human worshippers and with every other member of God’s created order.
John Gatta is professor emeritus both at the University of Connecticut and at Sewanee, the University of the South, where he has also served as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of several books concerned with theology, and with the interplay between imaginative literature and Christian faith.
A thought-provoking conversation between MTS Dean Dr. Peter Gathje and Dr. Robert Gottfried about the responsibilities of Christians for preserving God's creation based on Dr. Gottfried's book, Living in an Icon: A Program for Growing Closer to Creation and to God.
Western culture compartmentalizes social and environmental issues, which often puts movements for healing and justice in competition rather than collaboration. How can people of faith resist this and work together, with God, on the exquisite tapestry of liberation for all Creation? In this webinar led by the Rev. Leeann Culbreath, we explore intersections of ecological care and justice with other movements for liberation, particularly the movement to abolish prisons and immigrant detention. Together, we identify ways to build collective, connective strength and hope in the face of myriad systems of oppression.
Rev. Culbreath is a priest in the Diocese of Georgia, where she founded and leads the Creation Care Commission. For the past six years, she has catalyzed local, statewide, and national efforts to abolish immigrant jails and accompany those harmed by the detention system in their journeys of freedom and justice. She is a co-facilitator for the Episcopal Migration Ministries Asylum and Detention Ministry Network and serves on the steering committee for Georgia Detention Watch. Her environmental activism began in childhood, when she saved money from her newspaper route to help save the endangered California condor.
Faith communities traditionally offer their members consolation and support in times of grief. But at a time when more and more people experience grief from environmental losses churches typically have remained silent. How does a lack of public mourning affect people and society? What role can faith communities play in helping people during times of ecological stress and grief?
This webinar features Caroline Holmes, a Seasonal Park Ranger at Cedar Breaks National Monument in Utah. She graduated from the University of the South with a Bachelor of Arts in Environment and Sustainability and a Master of Arts in Religion and the Environment. Caroline combines her passion for education and the environment as an interpretive park ranger with the National Park Service. As a NAI Certified Interpretive Guide, she creates and presents programs that encourage participants to see the environment differently.
During this webinar, Rev. Cappel leads conversation on how we often exclude and minimize the place of non-human creation in our faith and practice. This marginalization of Creation is commonly manifested in the words we use and our habits of hospitality. The areas of deeper inclusion explored are:
The Word of Proclamation (proclaiming a greener gospel)
The Dance of Liturgy (celebrating in greener worship)
Attunement in Prayer (practicing a greener spirituality)
The Life of Community (living a greener kinship)
The Call for Justice (advocating a greener righteousness)
The Rev. Jerry Cappel is an ordained Episcopal priest currently serving at St. James Episcopal Church in Shelbyville, Kentucky. He also serves as the Environmental Network Coordinator for Province IV of The Episcopal Church, on the board for the Center for Deep Green Faith, and as a fellow with GreenFaith. Rev. Cappel has a Ph.D. in religious education and has worked as an author and editor of youth and adult education materials for Smyth & Helwys Publishing in Macon, GA and Church Publishing in New York.