In the old days all the cool guys and gals who wanted to show up “the man” devoted a lot of their creative geekiness to figuring out ways to get “off the grid,” devising Rube Goldberg-ish mechanicals and homemade micro-tech geared to living outside the nation’s energy infrastructure. It was laudable self-reliance—sometimes run amok—but it belongs to another age.
1. You don't have to believe in climate change to believe in its solution. Energy conservation and alternative energy use mean healthier children, improved national security, and lower heating and cooling bills for families and parishes. It's a "no regrets" strategy.
1. Schedule a Bike- or Walk-to-Church Sunday.
2. Offer pitchers of water instead of bottles at parish meetings and explain why plastic bottles aren’t good for the environment.
3. Serve fair-trade coffee and tea (in mugs instead of foam cups) after Mass, again with signs explaining why.
1. You don't have to believe in climate change to believe in its solution. Energy conservation and alternative energy use mean healthier children, improved national security, and lower heating and cooling bills for families and parishes. It's a "no regrets" strategy.
Parishioners at Mary Immaculate Church in East Los Angeles meet monthly in convivencias, or town hall meetings, to discuss parish initiatives. Last autumn, when they learned that 38 million water bottles annually are sent to U.S. landfills, their vote on what the parish should do wasn't even close. Plastic water bottles are now banned from the campus.
Parishioners at Mary Immaculate Church in East Los Angeles meet monthly in convivencias, or town hall meetings, to discuss parish initiatives. Last autumn, when they learned that 38 million water bottles annually are sent to U.S. landfills, their vote on what the parish should do wasn't even close. Plastic water bottles are now banned from the campus.
[Read more about St. Francis, patron of ecology.]
Hundreds of years before the environmental movement, St. Francis of Assisi recognized God in creation and changed his life. Today one of his spiritual sons, Keith Douglass Warner, O.F.M., is encouraging Catholics to do the same.
[Read more about St. Francis, patron of ecology.]
Hundreds of years before the environmental movement, St. Francis of Assisi recognized God in creation and changed his life. Today one of his spiritual sons, Keith Douglass Warner, O.F.M., is encouraging Catholics to do the same.
Simply defined, to sin is to say "no" to God. It is a rejection of God's free gifts as well as the grace-filled relationship that God always offers. It is to choose what is not good while exercising one's mature free will. Often it is as simple as choosing what is easy or what is the societal norm without using the eyes of faith.
If you want peace, cultivate creation," Pope Benedict XVI said in his 2010 World Day of Peace reflection, arguably a message not just for the new year but for the new decade. With one sentence Benedict adroitly tied together a gang of the major preoccupations of Catholic social teaching with Pope Paul VI's radical 1972 admonishment: "If you want peace, work for justice."
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