Category: Watershed Discipleship

Laudato Z’ine & Vati-Cats

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by Rose Berger

3810_001“Bienvenidos al Laudato Z’ine,” say the Vati-Cats. Welcome!

If you are here, then you are one of a select group to have heard about the Laudato Z’ine project, a kitchen-table experiment to spread the word about Pope Francis’ circular letter to the world (or encyclical) about climate change and integral ecology.

This started as a fun weekend project and has continued to grow.

Here are the pdfs for you to make your own Laudato Z’ine at home (page 1 and page 2 on 11 x 17 inch paper).
LaudatoZine_page 1 and LaudatoZine_page2.

Click here, if you want to read the original and complete Laudato Si’: On Caring for our Common Home.
Continue reading “Laudato Z’ine & Vati-Cats” →

Prayer for the Tortured Earth

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KaterinaBy Katerina Friesen

Katerina wrote this for a chapel service on Sept 1, 2015 at AMBS on “Crying out with Creation.” Pope Francis declared Sept. 1 as the World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation, as the Orthodox Church has done since 1989.

O Lord of mercy,
We pray for Your tortured Earth.
For forests scorched by drought-fueled wildfires out west.
For island nations drowning in rising ocean waters:
Fiji, Palau, Cape Verde, Kiribati, Micronesia.
For the sinking boats of refugees,
fleeing resource wars and famine.
Continue reading “Prayer for the Tortured Earth” →

People Power in Portland

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Portland GreenpeaceFrom Annie Leonard, executive director of Greenpeace, in a DemocracyNow.Org interview covering the creative and courageous action blocking Shell Oil ships heading to the Arctic to drill:

Well, yesterday was an absolutely incredible day, a display of people power. Throughout the day, the crowds just kept growing, as you said. There were hundreds of kayakers going in shifts, filling the river so that if the boat tried to leave, there would be both lines of defense—the aerial barricade and then the people.
Continue reading “People Power in Portland” →

A Covenant of Land & Waters

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Social ForumBy Bill Wylie-Kellermann

Come spring and then through summer and fall, we used to take our daughters for regular walks in Elmwood Cemetery on the near east side of Detroit. A favorite photo has them looking up in sun, caught in delight. This European burial ground is the last surviving bit of pre-Columbian terrain in the city. All the remaining earth has been cleared and graded and leveled first as farmland, then paved as urban built environment. This is not to say it’s old growth forest (that wood is long hauled off and the transplants tended into a canopy of stately beauties) but the land has rocky outcrops, ridges, rills, and a stream that emerges from underground to pool before slipping back beneath the street toward the river.
Continue reading “A Covenant of Land & Waters” →

Some Things We’ve Learned

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dsrThis past weekend was the Detroit Spirit and Roots Gathering. Over the next few weeks we will post some reflections from the weekend. This event began with the idea from Word and World to host a Land and Water School in Detroit. Over almost two years of plannings and conversations, it shifted into a collaborative event called Detroit Spirit and Roots. This was a process with lots of struggle and learning along the way. This document is a list of things we learned in that process which we used as part of our framework for the event.

“Some Things that We have Learned”
Detroit Spirit & Roots Gathering
Summer 2015

The Local Committee has agreed that this will be the framework that will guide our participation in DSR

What are the spiritual resources that our movement needs? Continue reading “Some Things We’ve Learned” →

Taking the First Step: Addiction, Ecology & Recovery

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SNGBy Rev. Solveig Nilsen-Goodin of the Wilderness Way Community in Portland, a team of Jesus-followers committed to “discovering wisdom for our time, healing for ourselves and our planet, and the power of untamable (resurrection!) life!” She and her partner Peter are also active participants with Eco Faith Recovery, a growing network of faith-based people and institutions within the Christian tradition, waking up to the enormity of the ecological-economic-spiritual crisis before us. Their children, Soren & Stig, recently interrupted our dinner conversation with chants of “We hate coal! We hate coal!” (above: the Nilsen-Goodin family)
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The profound ecological degradation we are currently witnessing and the rise of addictive behaviors such as alcoholism and drug addiction are two sides of the same coin.
Albert LaChance

Waking up to the developing global ecological crisis is like moving from being a child in an alcoholic family to growing up and going into recovery.
Continue reading “Taking the First Step: Addiction, Ecology & Recovery” →

Somewhere Between Sturgeon, Graffiti, and Jubilee

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jimBy James W. Perkinson. Written in preparation for the Detroit Spirit and Roots Gathering this upcoming weekend in Detroit hosted in part by Word and World. Published on On the Edge, a Detroit Catholic Worker Paper.

This summer in Detroit, some of us will attempt a new thing. Tentatively, slowly deliberately—we will convene a dialogue among three communities of inspiration. One is rooted in postindustrial soils, breaking street savvy into spit finesse, spun bodies, and tagged walls. Another is deeply historical, born of peasant resistance against ancient Roman might, itself gone genocidal and colonizing. The third, most rooted, is embedded in soils and waters, seasons and weather, enculturated by the place itself. Hip-hop, Christian, and indigenous by other names—three constituencies roughly demarked, will make common cause in concern for the future of de troit, the strait. We have named it the “Detroit Spirit Roots Gathering” and seek to serve a re-spiriting of the city in part by learning from each other’s stories. Continue reading “Somewhere Between Sturgeon, Graffiti, and Jubilee” →