God of Earth: Discovering a Radically Ecological Christianity

"Wonderfully penned meditations on the basic questions Christianity - and humanity - now face" - Professor Larry Rasmussen, author of Earth Honoring Faith: Religious Ethics in a New Key. "Informed by rich appeal to religious mystery, voiced in poetic imagery and cadence... offers thick attentiveness to the world" - Professor Walter Brueggemann, author of God, Neighbor, Empire: The Excess of Divine Fidelity and the Command of Common Good "Seeker and visionary biblical scholar, Kristin Swenson blows past petrified Christian traditions to shine light on a profoundly radical new way to experience God" - Stephanie Pearson, contributing editor, Outside magazine. "Calls us to heal and be healed... Fresh and poetic... opens a path for pilgrims seeking new ways of seeing and living with faith on the earth." Professor Cliff Edwards, author of Van Gogh and God: A Creative Spiritual Quest "...Motivates and empowers readers to stretch ideas of God as they care, in love and awe, for the earth." - Reverend Pat Watkins, United Methodist Missionary for the Care of God's Creation What happens if we imagine the Jesus of Christian theology to be realized in the nonhuman natural world around us? Basic to Christian belief is the notion that God, the creator of all, inhabited the earth in order to call to us. God of Earth embraces this central premise of Christianity - Jesus as both fully divine and fully human - and then allows for the possibility that such a Jesus need not be limited to a human man. What if Jesus were "God of earth" - not only over earth but also in and through it? As Swenson tracks that question through the cycle of a church year, she invites readers to reconsider our relationship to the nonhuman natural world and so experience new dimensions of the sacred and new possibilities for hope and healing.