Hope for Creation IACCW – Winter Week Eight Summary

A Cruciform-Shaped World

IFor class this coming Sunday, we’ll spend our final week on Mark Wallace’s When God Was a Bird: Christianity, Animism, and the Re-Enchantment of the World, focusing our discussion on chapter five, “On the Wings of a Dove.” As we journey deeper into the season of Lent, conjoined with our year long conversation and discernment, we’ll reflect with Wallace on the wounds of crucifixion we behold all around: “Our forebears executed God’s innocent son at Calvary in a paroxysm of rage and violence; we do the same by crucifying God’s winged Spirit on the Earth through market forces and habitat destruction…The Earth has become cruciform; the scars of Golgotha are everywhere…The continuing collapse of specifies and ecosystems – myriads of creatures and habitats that were once thriving among us in abundance and now eradicated forever – are the death of God in our time and place as well” (p. 166).