Creation in Crisis: Science, Ethics, Theology. By Joshstrom Kureethadam. Maryknoll, New York, USA, Orbis Books 2014. Pp. vii + 388. $50.00
Joshstrom Kureethadam is a Catholic priest and a professor. His background is in cosmology, and he currently holds the chair of philosophy of science at the Salesianum Pontifical University in Rome. A realization that has grown within Kureethadam ever since he began taking classes in ecology is that we need too develop a broader and holistic understanding of the contemporary ecological crisis. Too often, we merely relegate the crisis to merely be an “environmental” problem. What we do not realize is that our “common home” is in truly I peril. According to Kureethadam, the crisis poses a real and unprecedented threat to the very capacity of the earth to be a “home” (oikos) for humans and the rest of the biotic community.
What we need to do first, according to him, is broaden our perspective – the crisis is not merely a scientific concern, but is also ethical in nature, with physical, moral, and religious dimensions. In fact, Kureethadam calls it a profoundly spiritual crisis, for from a theological perspective it poses a threat to God’s creation, as it interferes with his plan to let the earth teem with life. The physical aspects of the crisis are well studied, especially because of the concern that the scientific community has given to it in recent years. The moral dimension has also received an increasing amount of attention in recent decades. The spiritual and religious dimension of the problem, however, has been neglected. The greatest lacuna, according to Kureethadam, is that we are yet to see the ecological crisis as a physical, moral, and spiritual problem all at once. This crisis is the most daunting challenge, and probably the most arduous one also, that Homo sapiens sapiens have faced since their derivation from lower primates. We are in a paradoxical situation today, Kureethadam contends: on the one hand, there has been an explosion of environmental activism n recent years; at the same time, the scientific evidence of our corporate abuse of the planet continues to roll in.
The first part of the book explores how the earth came to be gradually shaped as a home in the larger context of cosmic evolution, and how the building blocks of our planet came to be formed in the furnaces of the galaxy, which occurred over billions of years. However, in a very short time in comparison, human activities have begun to threaten the very capacity of earth to be a home for humanity and for the rest of the biotic community – this is our current situation and it is the starting point of the book. The cry of the earth is taken up in the second part of the book, and it offers a physical description of the contemporary ecological crisis, based on authoritative studies from the scientific community. The challenge of climate change is the most obvious; however, it does not exhaust the crisis, as evident by species extinction and biodiversity loss, the pollution of land, water and air, and the depletion of natural resources.
The ecological crisis also has a human face, as explained in the third part of the book, entitled the cry of the poor. Herein, we see that the crisis has deleterious impacts on some of the most basic areas of human life like food security, health and shelter. The crisis has a disproportionate impact on groups that are already vulnerable like women, children, indigenous groups, minorities, and not the least, the future generations. Kureethadam notes how the impacts of the ecological crisis will hit hardest the poor and the most vulnerable – women, children, indigenous groups, minorities, and not least future generations – precisely those who have contributed least to causing the crisis, which makes the contemporary ecological crisis one of the greatest ethical dilemmas of our age. In the fourth part of the book, the ecological crisis is explored as the cry of the gods, which draws out the deeper spiritual dimension of the crisis. Not only is the physical world creation, but it is also God’s creation, his own home, where God pitched his own tent. Increasingly blind to the sacramental dimension of creation, the ecological crisis has resulted in large measure from our disobedience of the first commandment given to humanity, namely, to be responsible stewards of God’s creation.
Kureethadam’s main argument within this book is that it is important to look at the contemporary ecological crisis from a triple perspective: physical, moral and theological, and all at once, in order to gain a total view of it. Only when we see our planet as our common home, in fact our only home, he avers, will we begin to understand the gravity of the contemporary ecological crisis. The main scope of the book is to offer a wider and integrated view of the crisis facing our common home by describing the ecological crisis – symbolically as well as in reality – as a triple cry of the earth, of the poor and of “the gods.” These three cries explicate the crisis from three different angles: the physical, the moral, and the religious. Although his positions should not be uncritically adopted, in my humble opinion, Kureethadam does a service in bringing to the fore our need to intently reflect on our relationship with our ecological habitat.