This Notre Dame game is too awful to watch, so I’m distracting myself with this article on creation care in the Washington Post by Rich Cizik. A few too many nods to the national narrative for me, but a good reminder nonetheless to preserve the land we live on.
Here’s an excerpt:
If my own two sons, ages 20 and 22, are any indication, they fear that powerful lobbies have the power to purchase at will the Congress and the White House. The public’s land and resources are too easily turned over to the “drill, baby, drill” gang.
Sadly, they are right. What’s happening is clear: This land, our land, the public’s land, is being seized in ever increasing measure for development. More precisely, it is being leased to oil and gas companies.
It is my worst nightmare to awake from camping, as I did this summer next to the French Broad River in North Carolina, to discover a bull-dozer clearing the public land for an oil rig. But this isn’t a bad dream, it’s commonplace around this land of ours. . . .
It’s about saving a bit of God’s gift of plentiful natural resources for future generations. Call it a campaign to “save a bit of heaven.”
Why cast it this way? The New Testament scholar N.T. Wright in his book “Simply Jesus” puts it as follows: “Within Jesus’s world, the word ‘heaven’ could be a referent way of saying ‘God,’ and in any case, part of the point of ‘heaven’ is that it wasn’t detached, wasn’t a long way off, but was always the plan from which ‘earth’ was to be run. When, in the book of Daniel, people speak about ‘the God of heaven,’ the point is that this God is in charge on earth and will eventually set up his own kingdom there.”
David R. Swartz 