Quote for Day: Why Scott Pruitt Kept Opulent Dinner with Cimate Change Denying Cardinal Pell a Secret — "It Was a No-Brainer"

Rachel Olding in an article entitled "Why George Pell dined with under-fire EPA's Scott Pruitt in secret," on Cardinal Pell's secret opulent dinner with climate change denier and Trump's EPA head Scott Pruitt — and why Pruitt sought to keep the dinner secret:

In the News: Trump Decision to Exit Paris Accord "One of the Most Ignorant and Dangerous Actions Ever Taken by Any President"

Elizabeth Johnson says it best #ParisAgreement pic.twitter.com/9yF7HGNHYN

— NETWORK (@NETWORKLobby) June 1, 2017

Rachel Held Evans on White Evangelical Roots of Trump's Decision to Ditch Paris Climate Agreement: My Response

I try not to blame white evangelicals for everything, but their rejection of mainstream science did the world no favors today.

— Rachel Held Evans (@rachelheldevans) June 1, 2017

Like Rachel Held Evans, I was raised in a white evangelical family in the South. Her approach to white evangelicals in this tweet is charitable, and I'd do well, I'm sure, to emulate her.

Katha Pollitt on Laudato Si': "If Pope Francis Really Wanted to Fight Climate Change, He'd Be a Feminist"

And more outstanding commentary today — this by Katha Pollitt at The Nation noting that Pope Francis's considerable blind spot regarding women's rights significantly diminishes the power of his encyclical Laudato Si' to address the world's ecological crisis effectively:

"Sharing Our Lives as Theology 2": Another Videotaped Conversation Between Ivone Gebara and Me, on the Papal Encylical Laudato Si'

At Easter time this year, I shared with all of you a video that came to us as an Easter gift from two amazing readers of Bilgrimage, Rachel Fitzgerald and Mark Shumway. As I noted when I shared this video, Rachel and Mark maintain the evolvingdeepforms blog to which this blog links.  

Naomi Klein on a Radical Vatican Under Pope Francis?

Some excerpts for you from Naomi Klein's recent New Yorker essay entitled "A Radical Vatican?": Klein notes that she was asked to speak at a Vatican press conference about Laudato Si' in early July, and attended the event with some trepidation. The torrid heat in Rome in July, the requirement that women visiting the Vatican be enswathed in clothes that cover their limbs, the fact that she was the only non-Catholic invited to be part of this panel, worry about whether the Vatican would turn off the air-conditioning at the event, since Laudato Si' states that the growth of an air-conditioning culture points to "harmful habits of consumption" now affecting the entire planet . . . . 

On Laudato Si' and Its "Integral Ecology" and Themes of Relatioality: Helpful Commentary

When I first responded to Pope Francis's encyclical on the environment, Laudato Si', I promised to provide you with some more reflections on the encyclical. These are not my own, but are from pieces I've read that strike me as valuable, since they zero in on the theme I wanted to point to in my own reflection — the theme of relationality. As I noted, the encyclical's stress on relationality, as it discusses the human connection to the environment and the need of human beings to acknowledge their own interconnection to address environmental crisis, is both its strength and its weakness.

Jamie Manson on Laudato Si': "How Has the Church's Paternalistic Need for Power Over the Sexualities of Its Flock Exacerbated the Conditions of the Poor?"

Jamie Manson notes that Laudato Si' does not acknowledge that having access to contraception has alleviated both poverty and ecological stress for poor women in some developing nations. Instead, Pope Francis suggests that the greed of the developed nations manifests itself in policies designed to curb population growth in the global South by pushing "reproductive health." This in a world in which, according to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, more than 220 million women in developing countries do not have access to contraception and family planning  services . . . . 

Rabbi Menachem Creditor on Charleston Church Hate Crime: "This Broken World Demands Upon Us All That We Cry Again to 'Mother Emanuel,' to Mother-God-Who-is-with-Us"

Rabbi Menachem Creditor on yesterday's racist hate crime in an African Methodist Episcopal church in Charleston, South Carolina: 

Pope Francis's Encyclical on the Environment, and the Impossibility of Discussing Violence Against the Environment Without Discussing Gender Issues

Call me crazy, but if I were a world religious leader writing a major document about ecology today — one which stresses that it is addressing every member of the human community — and if I chose to use the word "sister" fourteen times in that major document, I'd find some way, I think, to include the voices of the sisters of my own faith community in what I had to say. Say, Hildegard of Bingen and Julian of Norwich, who have a wealth of significant things to tell us about our relationship to the cosmos and the spiritual implications of that relationship . . . . 

As Pope Francis's Encyclical on Environment Nears, Attempts by Big Oil to Subvert It: Recent Commentary

As various news sources are reporting that Pope Francis's encyclical on the environment will be published next month, there's interesting reporting and commentary about the attempt of right-wing groups funded by big oil interests in the U.S. to subvert the encyclical — even before it has been published and before anyone really knows what it's going to say. Here's Garry Wills' take on this situation in New York Review of Books recently:

Quote for Day: Naomi Klein on Why We're Stuck with Climate Change — It's about the Economic Elite, Stranglehold, and the Fetish of Centrism

Naomi Klein is incisive — and powerful — as she explains why the human community is unable to address climate crisis that is now threatening the whole planet and therefore all of our existences:

Maureen Mullarkey Strikes Again (and a Reminder About Commonweal Catholic Centrism)

Remember Maureen Mullarkey? Sure you do! Back in 2009, when it became public that she had contributed to the prop 8 campaign to strip gay citizens of California of the right to civil marriage, though she had made a name for herself as an artist painting drag queens, I posted commentary about her. And then I noted her cozy connections to, well, see my conclusion below.*

In the News: Sixth Mass Extinction of Species Now Underway

In her review of Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction (NY: Henry Holt, 2014), Louise Rubacky notes that Kolbert's thesis — that humankind has precipitated the sixth planet-wide mass extinction of species, and this has already begun — warns of dire consequences when we "break evolutionary chains." Every species now disappearing had its niche in the complex, interwoven, delicate ecology that sustains the whole planet. And the loss of even a single species threatens to unbalance a web of relationships necessary to sustain life as we have come to know it on this planet.

Cooking to Save the Planet: Lentil Soup

Lentils first came to my attention when I went to college in New Orleans and stayed to work there a number of years, returning after I finished graduate studies to take a teaching job. My family ate (and relished) many pulses as I was growing up, including pinto or navy beans, which were both cooked with chunks of ham and then served (with their delicious, rich pot liquor) over cornbread — a recurring meal that my parents associated with their Depression-era childhoods, but which we all liked very much, especially when the beans appeared on the table with a bowl of my mother's tart-sweet, hot (from chopped jalapeños) chow-chow, redolent of the mixture of spices used to produce this end-of-garden pickled relish.

Cooking to Save the Planet: Mushrooms and Eggs (and Sweet Potatoes and Crème Fraîche)

Writing about food in the week after American Thanksgiving is like carrying coals to Newcastle, isn't it? Or gilding the lily. Or something along the lines of those two metaphors: too much too much, when we've just finished beating too much too much to death less than a week since.

Cooking to Save the Planet: Fried Eggplant

It's very hot this week in much of the U.S. Those of us who live in places like Arkansas know a thing or two about the heat, and about how to cook and eat when appetites flag due to the blast furnace the world has suddenly become, and when the desire to be in a hot kitchen succumbs to summertime torpor. As a public service to the rest of those not blessed to live in a perpetual sauna, here's my own prescription for eating well despite soaring temperatures:

Pictures from Late Winter, Early Spring

Just for the heck of it: photos from several months ago, that Steve just transferred to my computer as he transferred his far better snapshots of the "He Ate with Outcasts" painting I posted some days back, about which we've had discussions here (and re: which we're now very close to having some specific information for anyone wanting copies). What follows are photos Steve took on one of our afternoon walks in February:

The Month of May, 1898: A Passage from My Forthcoming Book About Wilson R. Bachelor's Work

And speaking of nature (I'm echoing here the sharp aphorism of Eduardo Galleano that I just posted): a constant theme throughout the writings of Wilson Bachelor, the 19th-century Arkansas country doctor whose diary, essays, and letters I'll be publishing in a book that will come out in a few weeks, is the healing power of nature. Particularly in his latter years, as his medical practice winds down, he notes in his diary that he spends much of his time sitting under an arbor of vines he had constructed in his garden, reading and watching the unfolding of the day around him.

Quote for Today: "If Nature Were a Bank"

Quote for today--Eduardo Galeano, Children of the Days: A Calendar of Human History, trans. Mark Fried (NY: Nation Books, 2013):