current affairs and causes on Landscape

We don’t know what’s going on here. If these tremendous events are random combinations of matter run amok, the yield of millions of monkeys at millions of typewriters, then what is it in us, hammered ...

All day long, all of us are framing and reframing our lives. We talk about the memory of our adorable but sexist grandpa. We label ourselves as movie critics or introverts or justice-lovers. We say th...

Too Busy for God? American work culture is all-pervasive. For many members of your congregation, it can be a real fight to get actual time off—and cell phones and the internet has made it possible to...

In the land whose founding metaphor was the mutuality of John Winthrop’s seventeenth-century vision of a “city set on a hill,” we live more and more in estranged, hostile, exclusive enclaves, linked o...

In March 2009, we received the results from the widest religious survey conducted in the United States, the ARIS (American Religious Identification Survey) study. There is much to gain from this repor...

The most exemplary nature is that of the topsoil. It is very Christ-like in its passivity and beneficence, and in the penetrating energy that issues out of its peaceableness. It increases by experienc...

My first call to ministry was in Eastern Washington state. It turned out to be one of the most prolific winemaking regions in the country. One of the things I learned from a local winery was really qu...

The creation of a white standard in the world during the age of exploration, and the white structural privilege prevalent for so long in America, led to what is often called “white privilege”. This is...

If we are to be God’s image-bearers with regard to creation, then we will carry on his pattern of work. His world is not hostile, so that it needs to be beaten down like an enemy. Rather, its potentia...

[A gardener cultivates soil more than plants.] He lives buried in the ground. He builds his monument in a heap of compost. If he came into the Garden of Eden he would sniff excitedly and say: ‘Good Lo...

There is no escaping the need to manage nature. The best we can do is to observe the following rule: So manage nature as to minimize the need to manage nature. . . . We are destined to work our way ac...

First, God placed humans here on earth to work the land where we are standing. The Hebrew here literally means to “serve” the land, implying that we humans are designed to serve the place where we liv...

To frame is to put a language boundary around our experience. It is to name what happens in particular ways, to say how we see the world, and to see the world how we say it is. Framing includes tellin...

The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Withou...

Gracious God, you tend to the earth as your vineyard, longing for it to bring fruit. You want our society and our lives to look more and more like the Kingdom of Heaven. We work against your plans, so...

The point of the dragonfly's terrible lip, the giant water bug, birdsong, or the beautiful dazzle and flash of sunlighted minnows, is not that it all fits together like clockwork--for it doesn'...

We say that Nature rests, yet she is working like mad. She has only shut up shop and pulled the shutters down; but behind them she is unpacking new goods, and the shelves are becoming so full that the...

Good farmers, who take seriously their duties as stewards of Creation and of their land's inheritors, contribute to the welfare of society in more ways than society usually acknowledges, or even k...

In wildness is the preservation of the world.

In human culture is the preservation of wildness.

Even the richest soil, if left uncultivated will produce the rankest weeds.

Justice is less like finite land and more like the wildflowers that grow there, continually spreading as they bloom and re-seed themselves. Justice—like beauty—is rooted in infinity.

The first phrase, “be fruitful and multiply,” means to develop the social world: build families, churches, schools, cities, governments, laws. The second phrase, “subdue the earth,” means to harness t...

The earth had been completely unformed and empty; in the six-day process of development God had formed it and filled it—but not completely. People must now carry on the work of development: by being f...

When a man's pride is subdued it's like the sides of Mount Aetna. It was terrible during the eruption, but when that is over and the lava is turned into soil, there are vineyards and olive tre...

The land of Israel is a small country. You can walk its length, north to south, in a few days, and from its central mountains you can see its lateral boundaries, the sea to the west and the river to t...

When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said 'Let us pray.' We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.” For more,...

What we plant in the soil of contemplation, we shall reap in the harvest of action.

Christian scripture is abundantly clear that redemption through Jesus’ work on the cross has implications far beyond the church’s usual emphasis on the restoration of human beings alienated from their...

Glorious One Maker of galaxies Maker of mountains Maker of me Thank you for your grace Thank you for reaching out For speaking through the majesty of your creation For speaking into the smallness of ...