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Overview
It is perhaps the critical issue of our time: How can we, as human beings, find ethical and sustainable ways to live with one another and with other living beings on this planet? Inviting us into the world of “green sisters,” this book provides compelling answers from a variety of religious communities.
Green sisters are environmentally active Catholic nuns who are working to heal the earth as they cultivate new forms of religious culture. Sarah McFarland Taylor approaches this world as an “intimate outsider.” Neither Roman Catholic nor member of a religious order, she is a scholar well versed in both ethnography and American religious history who has also spent time shucking garlic and digging vegetable beds with the sisters. With her we encounter sisters in North America who are sod-busting the manicured lawns around their motherhouses to create community-supported organic gardens; building alternative housing structures and hermitages from renewable materials; adopting the “green” technology of composting toilets, solar panels, fluorescent lighting, and hybrid vehicles; and turning their community properties into land trusts with wildlife sanctuaries.
Green Sisters gives us a firsthand understanding of the practice and experience of women whose lives bring together Catholicism and ecology, orthodoxy and activism, traditional theology and a passionate mission to save the planet. As green sisters explore ways of living a meaningful religious life in the face of increased cultural diversity and ecological crisis, their story offers hope for the future—and for a deeper understanding of the connections between women, religion, ecology, and culture.
Sarah McFarland Taylor is Associate Professor of Religion at Northwestern University.
Table of Contents
Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface
Introduction: Planetary Call and Response
1. The Green Catholic Imagination: Varieties of Companion Planting
2. Standing Their Ground: From Pioneering Nuns to Bioneering Sisters
3. It Isn't Easy Being Green: Habitat, Habits, and Hybrids
4. "Changeless and Changing": Engaged Monasticism in the Ecozoic Era
5. Nourishing the Earthbody: Sacramental Foodways and Culinary Eucharist
6. "The Tractor Is My Pulpit": Sacred Agriculture as Priestly Practice
7. Saving Seeds: Heirloom Conservation and Genetic Sanctuaries
8. Stations of the Earth: Body Prayer, Labyrinths, and Other Peripatetic Rituals
Conclusion: Stepping into the Future
Critical MassEarth Ministries in the United States and Canada
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
What People are Saying About This
This is one of the best books I have read on the lives and work of Catholic nuns in the United States after the Second Vatican Council. The book makes an essential contribution to the history of Catholic social justice and of American nuns. It is an inspiring call to service on behalf of our endangered planet.
Roger S. Gottlieb
What a delightful book! Intelligent, informative, enlightening and engagingly written. A sophisticated treatment of the intellectual issues is combined with a passionate concern for the real world. The result is that very rare academic work which is both true to its subject and genuinely hopeful.
Roger S. Gottlieb, author of A Greener Faith: Religious Environmentalism and our Planet's Future
Catherine A. Brekus
This is a superb, beautifully written book about Catholic sisters' involvement in the environmental movement. Taylor is not only an expert ethnographer who offers crucial insights into modern American religion, but a wonderful storyteller. Catherine A. Brekus, Associate Professor of the History of Christianity, University of Chicago Divinity School
Robert A. Orsi
This is one of the best books I have read on the lives and work of Catholic nuns in the United States after the Second Vatican Council. The book makes an essential contribution to the history of Catholic social justice and of American nuns. It is an inspiring call to service on behalf of our endangered planet. Robert A. Orsi, Warren Professor of American Religious History, Harvard University