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Duane Elgin replied to the topic What do think about the PAPAL Encyclical and How Will You Use It? in the forum my forum new one 10 years, 12 months ago
Terri– I’m pleased to hear the first chapter of the updated Voluntary Simplicity is helpful. I want to recommend another resource: a website called “Choosing Voluntary Simplicity.” Here is an important distinction made by the creator of the website, Shirley: Simple living results in a better LIFE.Voluntary simplicity results in a better life… but also a better YOU.http://www.choosingvoluntarysimplicity.com/what-is-the-difference-between-simple-living-voluntary-simplicity/#comment-235673
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Hi Jennifer and others. This is my first post and I’m struggling a bit with the technology. For ‘the others’ my name is John Leydon I’m a Columban missionary, living in Manila and Director of CELL – Center for Ecozoic Living and Learning. I guess that speaks for itself.
I have not contacted DTJN since signing up because I have been very busy with Global Catholic Climate Movement (GCCM). I am one of the conveners for the Philippines. We’re a spontaneous grass-roots movement of Catholics that came together around the anticipated encyclical. About 20 of us from all over the world meet weekly on Skype. We formally launched the movement when the pope was here in the Philippines in January. Our mission is to mobilize Catholic individuals and institutions to be involved in the ecological movement. Some might like to visit our website.
Anyway I would like to agree with the comments that the encyclical is very timely and very important. I wold also like to express my disappointment with the cosmology that is used to present the document. In fact when it was first issued I scanned it and was very disappointed. I had heard from one of the initial drafters that originally it was presented in a cosmogenesis framework, but that this was changed.
However, on further study, there are oblique references to a new cosmology and at least it does not rule our such an approach.
My overall sense is that it is presented in the 13th century Realism of Aquinas, Bonaventure, and Francis. This is something to celebrate, in that there is a rejection of Nominalism which wanted to confine God’s Revelation to scripture. Some would say that Western Civilization went astray with Church and Science backing Nominalism as a way of understanding the world.
However, the heart of what Thomas Berry is saying is that, at this moment, humanity must embrace cosmogenesis as the container for our various belief systems either religious or secular. I think we need to be conscious of this as we engage the letter. I have written some blogs on this but not sure where to post them here, if anyone is interested in this line of thought.
As I was reading the encyclical I also ‘happened’ to be reading this from Thomas:
“As all creativity involves being seized by an archetypal reality in the unconscious depths of the universe, as creative religious personalities were seized by revelatory experiences of the divine whereby they created the religious cultures of the past, so now we are being seized by a new revelatory experience that is coming to us in the new origin story and its fulfillment in this latest communion phase of the universe. It is the supreme challenge of our period to bring this new origin story into its fuller articulation. With this story as an orienting context, our way to the future is possible.”
I presume he means “ONLY with this story as an orienting context, (is) our way to the future possible.”