Stewardship at Concordia

Today I had the chance to be the inaugural speaker for the Concordia University Catholic Students Association. They are a new group — only been around a month — so I was delighted to be able to be there with them and support them. The topic they had proposed was quite interesting: Man is made to keep the garden — Stewardship in environment and religion. Unfortunately there were relatively few students, but that may have been just as well — I wasn’t at my best, to be honest, having just come off 3 hours of teaching at the Grand Séminaire.

For those wanting to know more about a Catholic perspective on the environment, the following website entitled Catholic Conservation Center looks quite interesting.

One thing the students did mention to me was that they had a hard time selling this talk to their fellow Catholics, some of whom accused them of being part of a trendy fad or even of encouraging druidism (!). I’ve encountered this sort of reaction myself, and in my experience it is more a reaction to the excessive sentimentalism of some of the environmentalists than to the issues themselves. Indeed, this sentimentalism is sometimes downright irrational. However, I think that an excessive opposite reaction is not helpful either: we must be able to appreciate creation in a joyful reaction to its beauty, as a gift coming from God. There is the possibility of a genuine spirituality of creation, it would seem to me, that keeps things in their proper order. Anyway, that’s what I tried to get across.

This post is dated Wednesday, November 11th, 2009 and is filed under Concordia University. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.