Earth's Cry

Global warming, melting ice-caps, shrinking rainforests, depletion of fish populations, rising sea-levels, species extinctions - these realities are now known to us, the words are familiar yet deeply unsettling and profoundly unwelcome. The enormity and complexity of the issues often leave us confused, despairing or simply numb. For Christians, a strange dissociation often seems to exist between the ecological crisis and a heritage that includes a Creator God. This book turns to the prophetic tradition - a tradition generated in the dislocation of crises in the past. Drawing this tradition into engagement with the ecological humanities (particularly eco-philosophy and eco-theology) and with ministry studies, the author discovers root memories that hold. Here is wisdom that could unleash our passion and energy by challenging us to attend to Earth's cry, to own the misuse of our power in silencing Earth's cry, to learn that grief is radical criticism and to imagine daring alternatives. A response to the ecological crisis is nothing less than a call to a fresh and radical vocation - to eco-prophetic ministry. ""This impassioned work of ministry and theology awakens us to the voices of Earth's cry, and to our own cry as well, in this time of escalating ecological violence. Jan Morgan joins a prophetic tradition whose great healing gift is to enliven our ability act in response to the great wounds of our time."" -Dr Deborah Bird Rose, FASSA Professor in the Centre for Research on Social Inclusion at Macquarie University, Sydney. ""With our world on a trajectory towards deep and sustained ecological breakdown, Jan Morgan's book is a prophetic offering in the full sense of that tradition: truth-telling, analysis informed by accurate seeing and listening, a call to fundamental repentance and changed praxis and, ultimately, the possibility of hope. The Christian Church, for so long compliant or complacent with regards to the cries of creation, is a sleeping giant in terms of addressing the environmental crisis. This book is a call to start loving our neighbour in the non-human parts of God's creation. And it is a timely and challenging wake-up call to the Christian church and its vocation of resistance to evil and to partnership with all that nurtures life."" -Rev Alistair Macrae, Past President, Uniting Church in Australia Christianity has often been blamed for providing a template for the domination of nature. Drawing on the prophetic tradition, with its attunement to the cry of the oppressed, Jan Morgan challenges the faith to open its ear to a new, ecological register of oppression and despair, as multitudes of beings march into exile and dispossession amidst the contemporary travails of Earth. With passion, clarity, insight, generosity of vision and always a gentle touch, she enacts prophetic conscience and enjoins the church to do the same, calling it uncompromisingly to ecological account. -Freya Mathews, Adjunct Professor of Environmental Philosophy at Latrobe University Jan Morgan teaches at the John Paver Centre at the Centre for Theology and Ministry (CTM) in Melbourne, currently conducting a program for learning and experience in ecoministry. She previously worked for over a decade at the Peter McCallum Cancer Institute in pastoral ministry training. Her home-place is by the now regenerating, shady banks of the Merri Creek in the inner city, and also at times by the stunningly beautiful (and invisibly deteriorating) ocean of the NSW south coast. Jan is a mother and grandmother, and completed doctoral studies at the Melbourne College of Divinity University in 2010