Good Health and Love
“Do no harm. Do all the good you can. Stay in love with God.” — John Wesley
“Do no harm. Do all the good you can. Stay in love with God.” — John Wesley
As Wendell Berry says, “Healing is impossible in loneliness; it is the opposite of loneliness. Conviviality is healing. To be healed we must come with all the other creatures to the feast of Creation” (The Body and the Earth, p. 99).
Jesus tells us that if a sheep falls into a pit, it should be rescued (Matthew 12:11). But what about a pig falling over a cliff? How can I understand a Jesus who drove 2,000 pigs to their deaths?
Jesus was not a vegetarian while He was here on earth, but might we consider Him one now?
“Because God created nature, it demands our reverence” C.S. Lewis If I care about the planet and its animals and maintain a plant-based diet, am I…
Thanksgiving is a time to cultivate gratitude. It is a time to celebrate all that we are thankful for. It is a time to remind ourselves to practice love.
That some wrest a pro-life ethic into an authoritarian morality focused on proselytizing a fundamentalist agenda should not be cause to dismiss the sanctity of life. What we need is a consistent theology for life across the board.
For centuries, Protestants have championed Martin Luther’s legacy of justification by grace through faith, not works. Habakkuk is the prophetic context from which Paul speaks in Romans of the right-making initiative that comes from God, yet it is often proclaimed from weekly pulpits in unbalanced ways that fail to connect to God’s work of justifying and righting all creation.
I have thought about how God’s judgments might factor into modern plagues, especially in light of the plagues in the Old Testament. Is this virus a punishment? A warning of impending doom? Is God trying to teach us a lesson? Some have suggested that we are experiencing an end time epidemic, taken right from the pages of the apocalypse. Is this really true?
I believe in the pursuit of health and the benefit of adopting a plant-based diet. We should continue to eat for strength rather than our gastronomical urges, but we need not go further back than the Old Testament narrative for ecological wisdom.