Linv in God’s Creation

Living In God's Creation: Orthodox Perspectives on Ecology (St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2009)

As some have argued here, the Church’s witness requires her to clearly articulate her anthropological vision.  The challenges that face both the Church and the larger society flow from competing visions of what it means to be human.

The articulation of an Orthodox understanding of the human person is central to our moral witness in the public square, to our evangelical witness in the human heart and (most importantly) the effective preaching of the Gospel from the pulpit.  If we cannot present a clear and compelling vision of human life, then on matters of personal and public morality, sexuality, politics and public policy, the Church cedes the public square and the human heart to increasingly pagan and disjointed culture.

Though her immediate concern is  the environmental movement, Elizabeth Theokritoff’s Living in God’s Creation: Orthodox Perspectives on Ecology, offers us an Orthodox approach to natural law grounded in Scripture and the Church Fathers and embodied in Christian worship and the lives and witnesses of the saints.  Theokritoff articulates for the reader a rich cosmological and anthropological vision that has implications not only for the environment but also economics and politics and it raises themes worthy of further exploration and study.  While I do not agree with her policy suggestions, — especially what I would argue are her misguided and very dangerous flirtation with population control — I do think those here interested in an anthropological response to contemporary issues would do well to read Living in God’s Creation.

You can read the whole of my review on Acton’s PowerBlog (Review: An Orthodox Christian Natural Law Witness).

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory