more and more often, religious communities are bringing their prayer and practice to bear on a profound religious and spiritual question: radical dangers posed by the climate crisis to the web of human and more-than-human life forms on this planet.
There are two ways we’ve found to relate prayer to the present crisis of our planet. One is exploring how earth awareness can enter more deeply into our formal prayer services. The other is exploring how public action intended to affect public and corporate policy toward the earth can become prayerful.
“Prayer is meaningless unless it is subversive,” Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel once wrote. One way to enhance earth awareness in the formal prayer of many religious traditions is to introduce new symbols and rituals into them. One extraordinarily powerful effort along these lines was undertaken at the Interfaith Summit on the Climate Crisis organized in 2008 by the...
