Tag Archives: Bill McKibben

Growing Up Is Always

Organized Christianity since its inception could rate an A or an F, depending on which bits you examine.

One could point to religious wars killing millions.

On the other hand, where Christians have become a force, slavery generally has been abolished. The status of women has improved. The sick and the poor are more often cared for.

Jesus himself said to judge his followers not by whether they say they are his followers. Rather, have well do they follow his examples? Do they feed the hungry, give water to the thirsty, take care of strangers, clothe the naked, and visit the prisoners?

Bill McKibben in his column in Sojourners (“A Mad and Dangerous Spell,” July 2021) faults those evangelicals who talk of the power of God to keep them from harm from the Covid-19 virus. For this reason, they say, they don’t need to be vaccinated against the disease.

“These sentiments sound pious,” he writes, “but they’re in fact the opposite—individualism masquerading as faith. God gave us a world that works in certain physical ways, and God gave us the brains to understand it.” Science developed the vaccines that have saved countless lives from Covid.

Against the anti-science of some evangelicals and others today, one must point to the books and learning kept alive in Christian communities during the European Middle Ages.

Ignorance is always being pushed back, for Christians as for anyone. Some of the first Christians owned slaves. Women were often placed in inferior positions. Some Christians (or calling themselves Christians) murdered each other and non-Christians in vicious wars and pogroms and crusades.

But change came. And Christians often led the changes, even against co-religionists.

The apostle Peter had to overcome his prejudice against Gentiles becoming Christians. In every generation since, we fight these battles to grow and overcome. We are always children striving to become the adults God wishes us to be.

Whatever Happened to Puerto Rico?

We haven’t heard much lately about the hurricane damage in Puerto Rico. Maybe by the time Hurricane Maria devastated the island, we were bored with hurricane coverage.

After all, we had already followed Hurricane Harvey in Texas and Hurricane Irma in Florida. Time to switch to more cheerful stuff, perhaps the latest breakup of a celebrity couple or our Facebook accounts of what we ate for lunch.

Bill McKibben, writing in Sojourners (‘Earth’s New Vulnerabilities,” December, 2017), recounts some of the devastation in Puerto Rico we may not have noticed. “Gone were airports and roads. Eighty percent of the island’s crops were destroyed . . . Almost all the cell towers. . . . Electricity was suddenly a thing of the past . . . Modernity retreats.”

To be sure, the aftermath of all three major U.S. hurricanes, not to mention the wildfires in California, strain our resources.

McKibben draws a deeper lesson. “We’re starting to realize how unbuffered the whole planet is . . . everywhere new vulnerabilities emerge almost daily.”

He calls on us to “staunch the flow of carbon into the atmosphere. Maria is what happens with 1 degree Celsius of global warming. We’re currently on a path for an increase of 3 to 4 degrees Celsius. That would be enough to join the whole planet in a community of collapse.”

Anybody for bringing back those forbidden words “climate change”?