Considering The Eastern Box Turtle

Indigenous Wisdom for Amending the Soil of Christianity

With the conclusion of the Spring Term I have multiple papers to share! This paper was my final for my World Religions class where I chose to engage with Indigenous theology as a site for healing the contaminated soil of Christianity.

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Introduction: Amending Our Soil

“Earth's crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God,

But only he who sees takes off his shoes; The rest sit round and pluck blackberries.”

― Elizabeth Barrett Browning

            While there is much latent within the Christian tradition for the development of a theology of ensoilment these potential formulations have become obscured within the larger body of Christian theology and spiritual practice. ^[1] Seyyed Hossein Nasr rightly identifies the source of this obfuscation as the “Promethean Revolt” within medieval theology and philosophy that ultimately led to the desacralization of nature and a collective spiritual amnesia within Christianity as it exists broadly throughout the world.^[2] The long-term effects of this revolt can be seen all around us, one such fruiting body being our present ecological crisis, which at its very root, as Lynn White Jr. has noted, directly results from this desacralized and domineering Christian theology.^[3] Now more than ever with the reality of large-scale environmental catastrophe seemingly no longer preventable Christians must commit to listening “carefully and with full attention” to other religious traditions, specifically Indigenous and Primal religions that have not forgotten their rootedness in the earth, so that new ecological commitments can be cultivated within Christian Theology.^[4] It is, I believe, through open engagement and dialogue with Indigenous wisdom that the sacred mycelial-like threads that exist just beneath the surface of the Christian tradition can be unearthed, and the soil of our spiritual practices become properly amended for the work of cultivating an ensoiled theology predicated on love of creation rather than domination and exploitation.

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^[1] “Ensoilment” and “ensoiled” throughout this paper play on the word “ensouled” within Christianity Theology and is meant to convey the notion of becoming radically reconnected to the Earth. I am using this language constructively to build upon notions of “embodiment” and “enfleshment” by rooting these concepts in the soil of the earth and an environmental paradigm capable of cultivating “land-connected selves” that live in solidarity with the earth and all of creation.

^[2] Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis of Modern Man (London, UK: Unwin Paperbacks, 1990), 68; This of course is not to further diminish the work that has been done, and is being done by indigenous Christian theologians the world over, but rather is an attempt to articulate the precarious situation that secularization and an anthropocentrism has created in concert with the domineering practice of Western European Christian Colonialism.

^[3] Lynn White, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” Science 155, no. 3767 (October 1967): 1203-1207.

^[4] “Scientists Deliver 'Final Warning' on Climate Crisis: Act Now or It's Too Late,” The Guardian (Guardian News and Media, March 20, 2023), last modified March 20, 2023, accessed April 12, 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/mar/20/ipcc-climate-crisis-report-delivers-final-warning-on-15c; C.J. Atkins, “Already Too Late: IPCC Report Says Global Warming Consequences Now Unavoidable,” People's World, last modified August 9, 2021, accessed April 12, 2023, https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/already-too-late-ipcc-report-says-global-warming-consequences-now-unavoidable/ Huston Smith, The World’s Religions (New York, NY: HarperSanFrancisco, 2009), 2.