Racial and Environmental Justice Must Be Taken Together
Read an excerpt from this excellent new book…
David W. Swanson
Paperback: IVP, 2024
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*** Read an excerpt from this book:
Fourteen years ago a small group of diverse people started a church in Chicago’s Bronzeville community. Our location in a historically African American neighborhood as a multiracial congregation means I’ve spent a lot of time thinking, praying, and preaching about God’s concern for racial justice. The community we’ve grown to be a part of, as will become clear in the pages to come, has shaped me far more than I could have imagined in those early years. I am a white man who didn’t grow up in Chicago, but the stories and histories of our congregation’s neighborhood have worked their way into my imagination. Emmett Till’s funeral was held in this neighborhood. Ida B. Wells lived here. Frederick Douglass organized here. Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. preached here. Gwendolyn Brooks wrote poetry here. How I understand racial equality has been thoroughly shaped by the Black freedom struggle that has been stewarded by generations of our neighbors and their churches.
My vocation as an urban pastor involved in justice and reconciliation ministries still occasionally surprises me. After high school in Southern California, I moved to the Blue Ridge mountains of North Carolina for college where I studied outdoor education and environmental studies. I envisioned a life spent outdoors, maybe as a camp director or park ranger. I’d always experienced God’s presence in nature, whether backpacking in the Grand Canyon, rock climbing at Joshua Tree, or exploring Venezuela’s rainforests where my missionary family spent most of my childhood. During college I struggled through my botany, biology, and geology classes. More enjoyable were the hours spent learning to maneuver a canoe down a tricky section of the Catawba River or leading a group on a backpacking trip through the Linville Gorge Wilderness Area. I spent three months with a camp ministry in Cochabamba, Bolivia, and thought I had discovered a lifelong vocation: teaching people to enjoy and care for God’s magnificent creation.
How God redirected me from a life outdoors to pastoral ministry in the third-largest city in the country is something that still astonishes me. My wife, Maggie, and I still joke about how different our life together has been than what either of us could have imagined when we were married in a chapel nestled in the Appalachian hills. Over the years, as our church has learned to worship together and serve with our neighbors, I’ve occasionally wondered about the connection between my concern for creation and my call to the ministry of racial justice and reconciliation. To be honest, the differences between the two often seemed incompatible to my uncreative mind.
Despite my lack of imagination, I couldn’t shake the sense that I was missing an important relationship between the Christian obligations to live justly with our neighbors and to care for creation. That hunch led to many conversations with the women and men in our church community who shared their experiences of God’s creation and society’s injustices from their distinct cultural vantage points. I kept my eyes open for authors, theologians, activists, and artists who held care for the environment together with the quest for racial justice.
Something in me resonated deeply when I stumbled onto a conversation with the cultural critic bell hooks and the agrarian author Wendell Berry, who observed that we “are under obligation to take care of everything and you can’t be selective if you are going to take care of everything” (bell hooks, Belonging (New York: Routledge, 2009), 186). I began noticing that some Christian communities, especially Indigenous Christians, had long appreciated the connective threads running through creation care and neighbor love. In short, I slowly—too slowly!—came to grasp that racial and environmental justice, to be rightly understood, must be taken together.
Adapted from Plundered by David Swanson. ©2024 by David Swanson. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press. www.ivpress.com.
 Reading for the Common Good From ERB Editor Christopher Smith "This book will inspire, motivate and challenge anyone who cares a whit about the written word, the world of ideas, the shape of our communities and the life of the church." -Karen Swallow Prior Enter your email below to sign up for our weekly newsletter & download your FREE copy of this ebook! |
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