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Catholics are prominently featured in a new Sierra Club book, Faith in Action: Communities of Faith Bring Hope for the Planet. The book highlights faith-led environmental action in each of the 50 states plus Puerto Rico and Washington, DC. 
Don Conklin and Ellen Buelow, members of Holy Rosary Parish in Albuquerque, NM, helped engineer a light-bulb swap–incandescent bulbs for energy-saving compact flurorescent bulbs. Before the program was over, 3,000 bulbs changed hands.
“We did this as a Lenten project,” said Conklin, a pastoral associate at the 2,700-household parish. “And it didn’t cost us a thing. It was sponsored by the Sierra Club and PNM,” the electric company serving the Albuquerque area.
The bulbs were distributed during an annual parish awareness weekend. “We’re planning our next awareness weekend and we’re coming up with the theme of helping families,” Buelow told Catholic News Service. “We’d like to get the concept of simple living in there. Economize and save the environment.”
The Faith in Action book also included these Catholic-led initiatives:
- In Colorado, Bishops Michael J. Sheridan of Colorado Springs and Arthur N. Tafoya of Pueblo called for a unified response after sewerage spills threatened Fountain Creek, which runs through their communities. The bishops’ statement had a “significant impact” said Ross Vincent, vice chair of the Sangre de Cristo group of Sierra’s Rocky Mountain chapter. “People who wanted to believe things were OK with Fountain Creek began to pay attention and realize something needed to be done. The bishops’ statement came at a critical time and it was deeply appreciated.”
- In New Orleans, members of Mary, Queen of Vietnam Catholic Church and their pastor, Father Vien The Nguyen, were able to halt post-Hurricane Katrina operations at a landfill that was not only close to their neighborhood, but was adajacent to a protected wildlife sanctuary. More than 200,000 cubic yards of waste from Katrina had been dumped in the landfill, which still leaks toxins into a canal used by the Vietnamese community for irrigation and fishing.
- The Michigan Catholic Rural Life Coalition used the National Catholic Rural Life Conference’s “Eating Is A Moral Act” program to demonstrate the many ethical implications of consumers’ food purchases. The coalition also educates the public about the need to promote stewardship of the land and promotes a sustainable food system that nourishes people, local communities and the earth.
- In response to the U.S. Catholic bishops’ call for action on global warming, the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis co-sponsored, “Global Warming: A Catholic Perspective.” One thousand people from 95 parishes attended the event to address the effects of global warming on the environment and the world’s poor communities.
Several parishes have now established their own “global warming action teams.” One of them, St. Joan of Arc in Minneapolis, launched a Green Power Campaign to encourage parishioners to purchase wind-generated energy.
-In Caguas, Puerto Rico, Father Pedro Ortiz and the Catholic parish of Nuesta Senora de la Providencia formed the Alianza Comunitaria y Ambiental en Accion Solidaria (Community and Environmental Alliance in Solidarity) in April 2007. The parish sets aside portions of its liturgical calendar for reflection on relevant social issues. Now, 100 community organizations, nonprofits, churches and universities from across the island with common concern for the environment have joined the alliance.
Mark Davis, a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, is a self-described Marxist environmentalist. His work has stirred both controversy and acclaim. 
His 2006 book, Planet of Slums, examines the current state of global cities, using a recent U.N. habitat report, The Challenge of Slums, as its starting point. 
“By the report’s conservative accounting,” Davis explains, “a billion people currently live in slums and more than a billion people are informal workers, struggling for survival…the entire future growth of humanity will occur in cities, overwhelmingly poor cities, and the majority of it in slums.”
According to Davis, progressive urban planners advocate “hazard zoning” to exclude development and population from dangerous floodplains, swamps, unstable hillsides, fire-prone brush lands, and liquefaction zones.
“Capitalist urbanization in the Third World works exactly by the opposite principle: concentrating huge densities of poor, vulnerable people in the most unstable and hazardous sites.”
Nevertheless, he sees cities as the solution to the global environmental crisis: “Urban density can translate into great efficiencies in land, energy and resource use, whlie democratic public spaces and cultural institutions likewise provide qualitatively higher standards of enjoyment than individualized consumption and commodified leisure.”
David has often criticized well-to-do environmentalists for ignoring the problems of working people. To that end, he argues that activists should link every environmental demand to a specific proposal that improves quality of life in working class areas, whether this be higher employment or more park space.
The Celtic Wheel of the Year is a book of new and original prayers by Tess Ward and published by O Books. It intertwines the two strands of Celtic Christian and Celtic pre-Christian traditions in a single pattern of prayer. 
Tess Ward was a psychiatric nurse and is now an Anglican priest and spiritual director and counselor. She has been a chaplain at an arts center, alternative worship leader, leads retreats and spirituality groups, and has been “road testing” her prayers for eight years. She lives in Oxford, England, where she is now a hospital chaplain.
Celtic Christians valued the natural environment for its own sake. They valued times of quiet in solitary and often wild places, where they could read Scripture, meditate and pray.
Because they lived close to the natural environment, it is not surprising that Celtic Christians discovered the immanence of God. Their poetry often echoes those Psalms which speak of God in nature (Ps. 19, 89, 98) suggesting a similar spiritual process at work.
The following extract of a poem in the Celtic psaltery is attributed to St. Columba in Iona:
“Delightful it is to stand on the peak of a rock, in the bosom of the isle, gazing on the face of the sea.
I hear the heaving waves chanting a tune to God in heaven; I see their glittering surf.
I see the golden beaches, their sands sparkling; I hear the joyous shrieks of the swooping gulls.
I hear the waves breaking, crashing on the rocks, like thunder in heaven. I see the mighty whales…
Contrition fills my heart as I hear the sea; it chants my sins, sins too numerous to confess.
Let me bless almighty God, whose power extends over the sea and land, whose angels watch over all.
Let me study sacred books to calm my soul; I pray for peace, kneeling at heaven’s gates.
Let me do my daily work, gathering seaweed, catching fish, giving food to the poor.”
Saint Erasmus has long been associated with the natural phenomenon known as “St. Elmo’s Fire,” a bluish glow of light generated by the electrical field of thunderstorms, and frequently observed on the masts and riggings of ships (and in modern times – aircraft.)
The mariners of Naples were the first to see this light as the outward sign of the intercessory protection of Saint Erasmus, and hence the name, “Saint Elmo’s Fire,” Elmo being a shortened, derivative version of the name Erasmus.
Saint Erasmus was a bishop of Formiae, Italy, who met a particularly grusome end during the persecutions of Emperor Diocletian. He was martryred by being disembowelled about 303.
The manner of his death led to him being named the patron saint of sailors. According to The Golden Legend, his stomach was slit open and his intestines wound around a windlass. This legend may have developed from an icon that showed him with a windlass, signifying his patronage of sailors.
It’s ironic how death and its artistic rendering combined to make a saint.
John O’Donohue was an Irish poet, author, and Catholic scholar who lived in the solitude of a cottage in the west of Ireland and spoke Gaelic as his daily language. His acclaimed writings reveal an original thinker rooted in a blend of Irish heritage, German philosophy, Celtic Christianity, and an intimate relationship with the ancient, wild and luminous landscape of his home.
O’Donohue is the author of several books, including international bestsellers Anam Cara (Soul Friend) and Eternal Echoes, as well as two collections of poetry, Conamara Blues and Echoes of Memory. He also wrote a series of monogaphs: Stone as the Tabernacle of Memory; Fire as Home at the Hearth of the Spirit; Air as the Breath of God; and Water as the Tears of the Earth.
“Celtic sensibility and the Celtic imagination looked on nature not as ’stuff’ or ‘location’ or ‘matter,’” said O’Donohue, “but nature was the theatre of a variety and diversity of divine presences. One of the great cankers and severances of western tradition has been dualism, which separated mind from body, self from spirit, person from God and nature from the whole lot! The Celts, in some strange way, managed to preclude that kind of fissure/opening which would lead to dualism, and were able to think in a unitive consciousness and think of all these things together.”
His poem Beannacht (”Blessing”) is a beautiful prayer.
This weekend workshop will explore ways we understand the spirituality of human health and sacred creation.
Participants will reflect on the work of Thomas Berry, Sandra Schneiders, the World Council of Churches and others in consideration of peace, creation and the environment. Berry has written “Human health is a sub-system of Earth’s health. You cannot have well humans on a sick planet.” The featured speaker is Dennis Patrick O’Hara, DC, ND, Ph.D., a professor of ethics and eco-theology at St. Michael’s College.
The program will be held at Calvary Retreat Center, located 40 minutes west of Boston. Offering: $225, which includes room, program and meals.
“In past elections, voting guides for Catholics, written from both ends of the political spectrum, have focused on hot button issues like abortion, gay marriage, war and economic justice. The environment, if mentioned at all, has been an afterthought. But the increasing urgency of climate change and its potential to generate catastrophic consequences for human life and civilization make this election different. This time, the environment is front and center.”
“The environment has long been a poor stepchild within Christian theology, and the Catholic Church is no exception. While Catholic social teaching has not wholly ignored the issue, the major social encyclicals of the twentieth century largely failed to tackle the question of our obligations toward the Earth. Although by no means hostile to environmentalism, Catholic social teaching consistently failed to place ecological concerns at the center of the church’s attention. Recent years, however, have seen signs of a shift in attitudes…”
Read the rest of this great article by Eduardo Penalver in Commonweal.
Last night I attended a private screening of “They Killed Sister Dorothy,” a documentary about Sister Dorothy Stang, S.N.D., an environmental activist who was murdered in Brazil in 2005. She began her ministry there in 1966.
A citizen of Brazil and the United States, Sr. Dorothy worked with the Pastoral Land Commission, an organization of the Catholic Church that fights for the rights of rural workers and peasants, and defends land reforms in Brazil. Her death came less than a week after meeting with the country’s human rights officials about threats to local farmers from loggers and ranchers.
After receiving several death threats, Sr. Dorothy commented, “I don’t want to flee, nor do I want to abandon the battle of these farmers who live without any protection in the forest. They have the sacrosanct right to aspire to a better life on land where they can live and work with dignity while respecting the environment.”
The film’s producers are outreaching to Catholic groups, environmentalists like the Rainforest Alliance, and other socially-minded people and organizations who want to support the poor in finding sustainable livelihoods.
I found the film very timely, with a growing interest by Catholics around the world in environmental protection, and the ways its abuses fall disproportionally hard on the poor and marginalized.
Michael Heller, 72, a Polish cosmologist and Catholic priest, has won the 2008 Templeton Prize. Reverend Professor Heller serves on the Faculty of Philosophy at the Pontifical Academy of Theology in Cracow. 
In his acceptance statement he said, “Things thought through by God should be identified with mathematical structures interpreted as structures of the world.” In a word, Professor Heller sees mathematics as the language of God.
Much of Professor Heller’s career has been dedicated to reconciling the known scientific world with the unknowable dimensions of God.
In doing so, he has argued against a “God of the gaps” strategy for relating science and religion, a view that uses God to explain what science cannot.
Heller said he believed, for example, that the religious objection to teaching evolution “is one of the greatest misunderstandings” because it “introduces a contradiction of opposition between God and chance.”
In a telephone interview, Professor Heller explained his affinity for the two fields: “I always wanted to do the most important things, and what can be more important than science and religion? Science gives us knowledge, and religion gives us meaning. Both are prerequisites of the decent existence.”
Heller’s current work focuses on noncommutative geometry and groupoid theory in mathematics which attempts to remove the problem of an initial cosmological singularity at the origin of the universe. “If on the fundamental level of physics there is no space and no time, as many physicists think,” says Heller, “noncommutative geometry could be a suitable tool to deal with such a situation.”
His philosophical hero is 17th century German mathematician-philosopher Gottfried Leibniz. In the margin of his work Dialogus there is a short handwritten remarks in Latin that says, “When God calculates and thinks things through, the world is made.” “My philosophy is encapsulated in that,” said Heller.
