Description: "Encounter enlightening and engaging views of monastic love for God's creation. In Jesus in Nature, Samuel Torvend uncovers the hidden story of monastic reflection on the presence of Jesus Christ in creation. With frequent references to contemporary life, he offers a comprehensive view of Jesus in his natural world and the various ways in which early medieval monastics discerned the presence of the risen Christ in nature's seasons, in flora and fauna, and in the pulsating energy that gives life to all things. For Christians who care for our common home, the earth, Torvend offers groundbreaking and enlightening views of monastic love for God's first gift, the creation, and presents wisdom for living today in a world that needs thoughtful persons of faith who are friends of the earth and its many creatures. In this book, readers are invited to engage the Book of Nature and the Book of Scripture and thus further their conversation between faith and science"-- Provided by publisher.
Brief description:
Samuel Torvend, PhD, is a priest in the Diocese of Olympia and professor of religion at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington. He is the author of Flowing Water, Uncommon Birth: Christian Baptism in a Post-Christian Culture; Daily Bread, Holy Meal: Opening the Gifts of Holy Communion; and Luther and the Hungry Poor: Gathered Fragments. His many published articles focus on the Eucharist and social ethics.
Review Quotes:
"Samuel Torvend has given us a rare and refreshing melange: a careful account of the ecology of the actual land in which Jesus walked set next to a striking survey of the ways in which the Gospels present Jesus as immersed in that natural world. Then that combination is set next to the voices of four Benedictine monastics who followed Christ in caring for the natural world, and all of this written in luminous prose. Read this prose and learn again that authentic religion is not flight from the world. Rather, with Benedict and Bede, Walafrid and Hildegard, it is delight in the manifold gifts of creation and a desire to honor the Creator by seeking to use those gifts to heal harms."
Gordon W. Lathrop, past-president, North American Academy of Liturgy and Societas Liturgica