WRITING in urgency, passion, and poetic prayerfulness, Emma Lietz Bilecky invites the reader to share in her personal processes of change — in particular, what she has learned in her work as a farmer; her need to rethink the Christianity that she was taught; how best to work now for our human survival in the light of inevitable climate change.
Professor Bilecky now works in Colorado, having graduated in both theology and environmental studies. She has managed several farms around the United States. She became a Fellow of Princeton Theological Seminary, closely linked to its farm (the “Farminary”), and taught on the mutual interactive processes between soil and human communities.
Bilecky learned from indigenous scholars who paid attention to their land and to the harms caused by colonisation; and from environmental activists in their connections between people and the places where they live. Her research in farming has transformed her understanding of land and soil, and of our human engagement for good or ill with earth’s life. “My job was to think about compost, write about compost, make compost.”
Compost is about decay and fertility, dying and living, feeding and being fed. This leads Bilecky to press for human connectedness rather than damaging individualism and for the interdependence between humanity and the earth’s living organism.
Bilecky’s personal journey has also required an extensive unlearning of the religious faith and language of her upbringing in a particular strand of American Evangelicalism, with its focus on sin, individualised salvation, and atonement as a response to an angry god. There was, she says, something anti-material about it.
What theological language is appropriate, she asks, for today’s changing worlds? Bilecky’s theological journey leads to describing God as Change. I found this her least clear section, and would have valued connections being made with the God who loves the world, whose Wisdom “holds all things together”, and whose grace is seen in compassion and healing, justice and peace.
The most grief-making change is the chaos and potential catastrophe of our changing climate — caused by damaging human impact on earth’s processes.
The book, a call for us all to pay more attention to the earth on which life depends, is well researched — with nearly 200 references to books or academic articles — and beautifully written. Each chapter is introduced by a reflective meditative prayer.
Dr David Atkinson is an honorary assistant bishop in the diocese of Southwark.
Decomposing Holy Ground: Theological compost for shifting worlds
Emma Lietz Bilecky
SCM Press £25
(978-0-334-06170-0)
Church Times Bookshop £20