Climate change promises monumental changes to human and other planetary life in the next generations. Yet government, business, and individuals have been largely in denial of the possibility that global warming may put our species on the road to extinction. Further, says Sallie McFague, we have failed to see the real root of our behavioral troubles in an economic model that actually reflects distorted religious views of the person. At its heart, she maintains, global warming occurs because we lack an appropriate understanding of ourselves as inextricably bound to the planet and its systems.

A New Climate for Theology not only traces the distorted notion of unlimited desire that fuels our market system; it also paints an alternative idea of what being human means and what a just and sustainable economy might mean. Convincing, specific, and wise, McFague argues for an alternative economic order and for our relational identity as part of an unfolding universe that expresses divine love and human freedom. It is a view that can inspire real change, an altered lifestyle, and a form of Christian discipleship and desire appropriate to who we really are.

Table of Contents

Preface

Part One: The Science and its Significance for Theology
Chapter 1: Climate Change: The Evidence and Consequences
Chapter 2: Global Warming: A Theological Problem

Part Two: Exploring God and the World within Climate Change
Chapter 3: Who Are We? Ecological Anthropology
Chapter 4: Who Is God? Creation and Providence
Chapter 5: How Shall We Live? Christianity and Planetary Economics

Part Three: Serving God and City Living within Climate Change
Chapter 6: Why We Worship: Praise and Compassion as Intimations of Transcendence
Chapter 7: Where We Live: Urban Ecotheology

Part Four: Despair and Hope within Climate Change
Chapter 8: Is a Different World Possible? Human Dignity and the Integrity of Creation in a Time of Global Warming
Chapter 9: ?The Dearest Freshness Deep Down Things: The Holy Spirit and Climate Change

Notes

"Global warming is as much a theological challenge as an engineering one. How do we understand God in a world where we're now dominating nature? How do we understand ourselves in such a way that we might shrink our impacts? Sallie McFague offers a lucid and powerful guide to these questions, and helps advance the field of environmental theology a giant step."
— Bill McKibben, American environmentalist and writer, Scholar in residence, Middlebury College

"Sallie McFague has brought the fruits of decades of thinking about God and the world, about individual and community, about humanity and nature, about reality and metaphor, about the sacramental and the prophetic, to bear on the critical issue of climate change. She calls Christians to new feeling, new acting, and new thinking. Perhaps as the threat to our world that she describes so well presses more obviously upon us, the church will begin to listen."
— John B. Cobb Jr., Professor Emeritus, Claremont School of Theology