Description: A powerful eco-theological call to reconnect with the land through ritual, offering spiritual practice and practical action against climate crisis and capitalist disconnection.
Review Quotes:
"Fall in love with land and the places you exist! Reimagine a (k)new world where commodification, extraction, exclusion and ownership are no longer the forced norm. Activate your responsibility to belong to earth and all living things. Theologian-Author Claudio Carvalhaes is calling for new spiritual practices where every gesture and intention brings us into embodied relationality with our natural world. How absolutely refreshing to read something of this quality! Mahalo Claudio for describing the elephant in the room and how we can instead connect, honor, and become by rising, bowing and prostrating as three gestures of renewal and awakening. We do this collectively, one at a time. May the ideas within this book be planted in our hearts and may our spiritual practices exponentially alert the world to the evolutionary change we are now in. Ho?oulu aku, ho?oulu mai. Our growth is collective." --Manulani Aluli Meyer, Native Hawaiian scholar-practitioner
"Earth, our home, is a fragile place.And close to the point of peril.
We know what we must do.
We must restore the Earth anew.
But how will we learn another way?
So sings the mass chorus in Ellingboe and Silvestri's plaintive eco-cantata, A Place Called Home. Claudio Carvalhaes's Spiritual Practices for a Changing Earth is the most extraordinary and enlivening response I have read for learning another way. Never in such a short book have I found a more penetrating analysis of what brings us to the point of peril combined with the spirituality and ritual that draw us into another way. Yes, I knew full well that apart from Earth's grace, we do not, and cannot, exist. But not until I joined Carvalhaes across these pages was the alternative way so clear, so compelling, and so utterly essential." --Larry Rasmussen, Reinhold Niebuhr Professor Emeritus of Social Ethics, Union Theological Seminary "Cláudio's book comes as a wise, generous, and learned intervention, an act of inspiration, atonement, and realignment from a creative conjurer of ecorituals playful and profound. Drawing on a host of age-old heritages, as well as cutting-edge thinking, the modest practices and rituals he offers aim at nothing less than the transformation of ourselves, so that we might in turn transform our societies." --Jonathan Schorsch, Professor at the SUNY University of Potsdam