The following post appeared in the Spring 2026 issue of Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality, which is available online.

HEARING THE CRY OF THE EARTH

While climate science continues to verify that climate change is a major contributor to weather-related disasters around the world, efforts to mitigate climate change are failing. People within and outside of traditional religions acknowledge that the source of this failure lies not only in government and corporation resistance to effective action but also within each one of us. We need to do serious inner work and participate in the Great Work described by Thomas Berry as humanity’s essential, ongoing task to transition from being a disrupting force on earth to becoming a “benign presence.”[1] And importantly, the inner work of ecospirituality is happening within a global spiritual and cultural transformation.

About forty years ago, Fordham University’s Theology Department colleagues Thomas Berry and Ewert Cousins began discussing the possibility that we are in a second axial period of great cultural and spiritual change. In publications subsequent to their conversations, Cousins argued that the second axial period will prove to be as profound as the first when major religious figures and scriptures appeared around the world between 800 and 200 BCE, an idea proposed by Karl Jaspers.[2] Teachings and spiritualities arising during this period were grounded in visions of a personal divinity or impersonal reality that transcended earthly concerns. (Exceptions were figures or movements of mysticism which saw the transcendent as imminent within creation.) But Berry and Cousins have argued that because of threats to our planet’s wellbeing, religious beliefs and spiritual practices must now be deeply rooted in the earth, a change in orientation that can learn much from Indigenous peoples’ wisdom and knowledge gained through modern science. In Christian terms, we must not only hear the cry of the poor but the cry of the earth.

In recent years, readers concerned with climate change and loss of biodiversity have gained valuable insights from books by writers on Indigenous wisdom and recent scientific research into the animal world. For example, in Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (2015), Robin Wall Kimmerer, a Potawatomi botanist and professor at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, explains that Ojibwe words for a bay of water, a hill, a beach are verbs, not nouns. Calling this a “grammar of animacy,” she cites Berry’s notion that “we must say of the universe that it is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.”[3] An example from science, Ed Yong’s An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us (2023), presents research which highlights the importance of understanding nonhuman species from their unique perspectives rather than just seeing them through a human lens.

In the fifth century CE, Augustine wrote that there are two sacred books of divine revelation: the Book of Nature and the Book of Scripture.[4] Thanks to Indigenous wisdom and recent science, many Christians are learning to “read” the Book of Nature more deeply and perceive the natural world on a spiritual level in an I-thou rather than an I-it relationship. As a result, new liturgies inspired by ecospirituality praise the beauty of creation, lament the harm being done to the nonhuman world, and ask for forgiveness for neglect and exploitation of natural resources. In a movement called the Wild Church, ecospiritual communities gather outdoors for worship to enable direct spiritual connection with the natural world.  Christians are also exploring ways to experience the divine in nature in contemplative retreats and practices.[5]

Any study of new forms of inner work in this time of global transformation must recognize the fundamental relationship between ecospirituality and ecojustice. Ecospirituality provides the inner motivation and compassion to engage in the actions of ecojustice. The two are complementary in the ways they recognize that human well-being is interconnected with the health of the natural world. Nourished by our ecospiritual beliefs and practices, we learn to hear the cry of the earth and respond with actions of loving care for our nonhuman neighbors in the earth community.

Jonas Barciauskas

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[1] Thomas Berry, The Great Work: Our Way into the Future. 1st ed. (New York: Bell Tower, 1999), 7.

[2] Ewert H. Cousins, Global Spirituality toward the Meeting of Mystical Paths (Madras [India]: Radhakrishnan Institute for Advanced Study in Philosophy, University of Madras, 1985), 10-14, 16-18, 20-135.  Also his Christ of the 21st Century (Rockport, Mass.: Element, 1992, 1998).

[3] Robin Wall Kimmere, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. (Milkweed Editions, 2013), 54-56.

[4] See, for example, Augustine, “Sermon 68,” in Sermons III (51–94), ed. John E. Rotelle, trans. Edmund Hill (New City, 1991).

[5] See, for example, Victoria Loorz, Church of the Wild: How Nature Invites Us into the Sacred, (Broadleaf Books, 2021), and Steven Chase, Nature as Spiritual Practice, (Eerdmans, 2011) with its companion volume A Field Guide to Nature as Spiritual Practice, (Eerdmans, 2011).