the notion of environmental “stewardship” within Christian theology is a tired old idea. As a theologian I fundamentally disagree with it. Stewardship implies a subject/object relationship with creation. We don’t need such dull relationships in religion’s name.
For decades I have been putting forth a different spiritual basis for an eco-theology: the idea that the “Cosmic Christ” is the light in every being in the universe. In other words, every being in the universe is the image of God. The “Buddha Nature” is a parallel name for this same idea within Buddhism, and this idea also exists at the heart of the Jewish tradition.
In The Coming of the Cosmic Christ, a book I wrote twenty-six years ago, I pointed out that if Christ is “the light in all beings” (John 1) and science today teaches us that every atom in the universe contains photons or light waves, then...
