Welcome to Eureka Street
Looking for thought provoking articles?Subscribe to Eureka Street and join the conversation.
Passwords must be at least 8 characters, contain upper and lower case letters, and a numeric value.
Eureka Street uses the Stripe payment gateway to process payments. The terms and conditions upon which Stripe processes payments and their privacy policy are available here.
Please note: The 40-day free-trial subscription is a limited time offer and expires 31/3/24. Subscribers will have 40 days of free access to Eureka Street content from the date they subscribe. You can cancel your subscription within that 40-day period without charge. After the 40-day free trial subscription period is over, you will be debited the $90 annual subscription amount. Our terms and conditions of membership still apply.
While Francis has no time for technological solutions and 'fixes' for complex ecological problems, he is no techo-Luddite. What he does is link technological knowledge to power and says that those with this knowledge and the economic resources to use it, gain 'an impressive dominance over the whole of humanity and the entire world.'
I suspect Pope Francis had some of our Jesuit alumni in mind when he wrote in his encyclical Laudato Si: 'A politics concerned with immediate results, supported by consumerist sectors of the population, is driven to produce short-term growth... True statecraft is manifest when, in difficult times, we uphold high principles and think of the long-term common good. Political powers do not find it easy to assume this duty'.
Laudatio si is an extraordinary document addressed to 'every living person on this planet'. Ecological issues are no longer an after thought but up there with social justice and equity in an incisive, practical, realistic and far-reaching encyclical that tackles the most important issues facing us honestly and with absolute integrity. It will upset a lot of apple carts in the Church and in the world.
With the introduction of the carbon tax in July, we are beginning to experience the consequences of attempts to address the threat of climate change. Theologian, ethicist and Uniting Church minister Noel Preston has led the way in the religious realm in thinking and talking about a range of ecological issues, including climate change.
'This Jesuit network will not succeed where Copenhagen failed, but it is an incremental contribution to one of the great moral challenges of our age [climate change].' Text from Frank Brennan's paper 'An interpretation and a raincheck on GC 35's call to develop international and interprovincial collaboration', Boston College, 28 April 2012.
A Riverina farmer told ABC Radio that the environment will always survive, but once communities die, they're gone. The truth is that without protecting the ecological health of the rivers, dependent communities will not survive.
Jesuit Fr Jean-Yves Calvez's 1957 work La pensée de Karl Marx was as much studied in Communist cells as in Catholic circles. Fr Calvez systematically studied Catholic Social Teaching, and his impact on Catholic attitudes was enormous but diffuse.
This week's release of the new social encyclical Caritas in Veritate expands moral teaching to promote a concept of 'human ecology' that covers both human life and the environment. It would seem that Benedict is not a climate change sceptic.
In the age of equal opportunity and unisex underwear, the feminist movement seems as incendiary as a cup of tea. Then there's ecofeminism, which argues that 'the domination of women and the domination of nature are fundamentally connected'.
Catholic and Anglican Churches are relatively recent converts to religious environmentalism. The rhetoric of the Catholic Church on Creation-care remains largely an optional extra for its organisations; economic and institutional gains take precedence.
There is tension in the churches between those focused on piety and those engaged with social justice. Benedict's document on globalisation will presumably stress that concern for social justice is essential to the Church's mission.
37-48 out of 50 results.