Simple living, veganism, and transformation in a world of limits
Politicians fiddle while Colorado burns. We need to change our lifestyle if we want to avoid this fate or one like it. You can’t “grow the economy” without increasing fossil fuel use and without making climate change worse, not to mention the other serious problems which economic growth will make worse — resource depletion, soil erosion, species extinctions, and world hunger. People need to understand this and learn to live with less. Continue reading “The Fire Blog”
James McWilliams wrote an excellent piece on “the best vegan approach” in which he mentions “health, environmental, and ethical angles,” and speaks out for inclusion of all the various reasons for going vegan: “When we confine ourselves to a single approach, we confine the scope of our message.”
The idea that we need multiple approaches — and in fact, these three specific approaches — was a basic theme of my 1983 book A Vegetarian Sourcebook: The Nutrition, Ecology, and Ethics of a Natural Foods Diet. When I started compiling all of the reasons for being vegetarian (about 1980), I found different “numbers” of reasons being given by various people: seven, twelve, or 101 reasons. But they all boil down to three basic issues. Continue reading “What’s the Best Vegan Approach?”
Walter Wink died on May 10. The New York Times called him “an influential liberal theologian whose views on homosexuality, nonviolence and the nature of Jesus challenged orthodox interpretations.” He was Professor of Biblical Interpretation at Auburn Theological Seminary in New York. He wrote a number of books, some of which won awards. He also wrote the foreword for my book The Lost Religion of Jesus, which is his main connection to my life.
Walter Wink was someone who saw the connection between Christianity and real life. An article he wrote for “The Fourth R” describes his life perhaps better than the New York Times obituary. Here is someone who takes his life’s work seriously, seeks to connect scholarship to the real world, and sought to push scholars in that direction, as a lot of people would likely tell you.
What is likely less well known is that he also realized that Jewish Christianity and the Ebionites posed a fundamental problem for historical Jesus scholarship, and sought to connect that to the real world. Continue reading “Walter Wink”