Empathy is one of those words that risks being worn thin by overuse and is too frequently misunderstood. It shows up everywhere now… in leadership manuals, in political rhetoric, in the well-meaning exhortations we give children and congregations. And yet, for all its familiarity, empathy remains deeply misunderstood. Too often it is reduced to a moral sentiment, a kind of emotional niceness, or worse, a strategy for persuasion. I want to suggest something quieter and more demanding… empathy as a way of perceiving.
“Empathy is the experience of foreign consciousness in general.”
Edith Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, trans. Waltraut Stein (ICS Publications), p. 11
I have come to think of empathy not primarily as an ethical achievement but as an ontological posture. It is not something we do after we have already decided what matters. It is the manner in which the world first comes to matter at all.
This conviction has been sharpened for me through sustained engagement with Edith Stein, whose phenomenology of empathy remains one of the most careful and restrained accounts we have. For Stein, empathy is neither emotional contagion, weakness, nor imaginative projection. It is the act through which another subject’s experience is given to me as theirs, not mine. Empathy discloses interiority without collapsing difference. It is, from the start, a mode of knowing that preserves distance.
“The empathized experience is not given to me originally, but non-originally.”
Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, p. 7
In my own work, empathy names the fragile, attentive space where another presence addresses us before we categorize it, manage it, or explain it away. This is as true of human encounters as of encounters with trees, landscapes, animals, or histories. Empathy is the discipline of allowing oneself to be interrupted.
That interruption is rarely dramatic. Most often, it happens slowly, almost imperceptibly. A pause before speaking. A hesitation before naming. A sense that what is before me exceeds my grasp. In that pause, empathy is born… not as fusion or projection, but as restraint.
One of the mistakes modern culture makes is assuming that empathy means feeling what another feels. That framing subtly centers the self. It asks how the other’s experience can be translated into my own emotional register. Stein is especially helpful here. She insists that empathy is a non-original experience… I do not live the other’s joy or suffering as my own, but I genuinely encounter it as real. This distinction matters. It protects the other from appropriation and the self from illusion.
“The subject of the empathized experience is not identical with the subject who empathizes.”
Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, p. 10
This has profound implications for how we relate to the more-than-human world. When I sit with a tree… especially the black walnut that has quietly shaped my days over the past year… empathy does not mean imagining what it would be like to be a tree. That is a category error. Instead, empathy means allowing the tree to show up as something other than a resource, a metaphor, or a background object. It means attending to its rhythms, its vulnerabilities, its way of occupying time.
Here, Stein’s work opens a door rather than closing one. If empathy is the basic way another’s interiority becomes perceptible without being reduced, then the question is not whether nonhuman beings “have” interiority in a human sense. The question is whether we have trained ourselves to attend to modes of presence that do not mirror our own. Empathy, in this sense, is ecological. It resists extraction. It slows us down. It teaches us how to dwell rather than dominate.
“Empathy gives us experience of other persons and of their experiences, but it does not make them our own.”
Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, p. 12
I have found that empathy is also inseparable from humility. It requires accepting that understanding is always partial, always provisional. Stein never treats empathy as exhaustive knowledge. It is an opening, not a possession. This is uncomfortable in a culture that prizes mastery and certainty. Empathy refuses shortcuts. It cannot be automated or optimized. It unfolds through presence, patience, and a willingness to remain with what does not resolve.
This is why empathy cannot be commanded. It cannot be forced through moral exhortation alone. It must be cultivated through practices of attention… through walking familiar paths slowly, through listening without rehearsing replies, through learning the names and habits of the places we inhabit. Empathy grows where curiosity is protected.
And perhaps this is the most important thing I have learned. Empathy is not a soft virtue. It is a demanding discipline. It asks us to remain open in a world that rewards closure. It asks us to stay porous when efficiency would prefer boundaries sealed tight. It asks us to receive before we judge.
“It is only through empathy that we gain knowledge of the psychic life of others.”
Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, p. 14
If there is a future worth hoping for… ecologically, socially, spiritually… it will not be engineered solely through better systems or smarter technologies. It will be shaped by the recovery of this ancient, fragile capacity to be addressed by what is not ourselves.
Empathy does not solve the world’s problems. But without it, we cannot even perceive them rightly.
“Finite knowing is essentially fragmentary.”
Stein, Finite and Eternal Being, trans. Kurt Reinhardt (ICS Publications), p. 389
Over the past year, I’ve been tracking a question that began with a simple observation: Artificial intelligence isn’t only code or computation, but it’s infrastructure. It eats electricity and water. It sits on land. It reshapes local economies and local ecologies. It arrives through planning commissions and energy grids rather than through philosophical conference rooms.
That observation was the starting point of my November 2025 piece, “Artificial Intelligence at the Crossroads of Science, Ethics, and Spirituality.” In that first essay, I tried to draw out the scale of the stakes from the often-invisible material costs of AI, the ethical lacunae in policy debates, and the deep metaphysical questions we’re forced to confront when we start to think about artificial “intelligence” not as an abstraction but as an embodied presence in our world. If you haven’t read it yet, I would recommend it first as it provides the grounding that makes the new essay more than just a sequel.
Here’s the extended follow-up titled “After the Crossroads: Artificial Intelligence, Place-Based Ethics, and the Slow Work of Moral Discernment.” This piece expands the argument in several directions, and, I hope, deepens it.
If the first piece asked “What is AI doing here?”, this new essay asks “How do we respond, ethically and spiritually, when AI is no longer just a future possibility but a present reality?”
A few key parts:
1. From Abstraction to Emplacement
AI isn’t floating in the cloud, but it’s rooted in specific places with particular water tables, zoning laws, and bodies of people. Understanding AI ethically means understanding how it enters lived space, not just conceptual space.
2. Infrastructure as Moral Problem
The paper foregrounds the material aspects of AI, including data centers, energy grids, and water use, and treats these not as technical issues but as moral and ecological issues that call for ethical attention and political engagement.
3. A Theological Perspective on Governance
Drawing on ecological theology, liberation theology, and phenomenology, the essay reframes governance not as bureaucracy but as a moral practice. Decisions about land use, utilities, and community welfare become questions of justice, care, and collective responsibility.
4. Faith Communities as Ethical Agents
One of my central claims is that faith communities, including churches, are uniquely positioned to foster the moral formation necessary for ethical engagement with AI. These are communities in which practices of attention, patience, deliberation, and shared responsibility are cultivated through the ordinary rhythms of life (ideally).
This perspective is neither technophobic nor naïvely optimistic about innovation. It insists that ethical engagement with AI must be slow, embodied, and rooted in particular communities, not divorced into abstract principles.
Why This Matters Now
AI is no longer on the horizon. Its infrastructure is being built today, in places like ours (especially here in the Carolinas), with very material ecological footprints. These developments raise moral questions not only about algorithmic bias or job displacement, important as those topics are, but also about water tables, electrical grids, local economies, and democratic agency.
Those are questions not just for experts, but for communities, congregations, local governments, and engaged citizens.
This essay is written for anyone who wants to take those questions seriously without losing their grip on complexity, such as people of faith, people of conscience, and anyone concerned with how technology shapes places and lives.
I’m also planning shorter, reader-friendly versions of key sections, including one you can share with your congregation or community group.
We’re living in a time when theological attention and civic care overlap in real places, and it matters how we show up.
Abstract
This essay extends my earlier analysis of artificial intelligence (AI) as a convergence of science, ethics, and spirituality by deliberately turning toward questions of place, local governance, and moral formation. While much contemporary discourse on AI remains abstract or global in scale, the material realities of AI infrastructure increasingly manifest at the local level through data centers, energy demands, water use, zoning decisions, and environmental impacts. Drawing on ecological theology, phenomenology, and political theology, this essay argues that meaningful ethical engagement with AI requires slowing technological decision-making, recentering embodied and communal discernment, and reclaiming local democratic and spiritual practices as sites of moral agency. Rather than framing AI as either salvific or catastrophic, I propose understanding AI as a mirror that amplifies existing patterns of extraction, care, and neglect. The essay concludes by suggesting that faith communities and local institutions play a crucial, underexplored role in shaping AI’s trajectory through practices of attentiveness, accountability, and place-based moral reasoning.
This February, I’m grateful to be part of several overlapping scholarly conversations that sit at the intersection of ecology, theology, history, and art. Each of these gatherings asks, in different ways, how we learn to see more carefully… how we remember more truthfully and how our intellectual work might cultivate forms of attentiveness that matter beyond the academy.
Below are brief introductions to each conference, along with the abstracts for the papers I’ll be presenting.
“And Who Is My Neighbor?”
Refuge, Sanctuary, and Representation in Modern Art and Visual Culture ASCHA Symposium | Chicago | February 17
I’ll be presenting at a symposium sponsored by the Association of Scholars of Christianity in the History of Art and DePaul University, focused on questions of hospitality, displacement, sanctuary, and visual representation in modern and contemporary art.
This gathering brings together scholars working across art history, theology, and cultural studies to think seriously about how images shape moral imagination in times of migration, precarity, and contested belonging.
Ecologies of Refuge: Trees, Crosses, and the Art of Neighborliness
Abstract:
This paper examines how modern and contemporary visual culture has drawn upon arboreal imagery, cruciform forms, and ecological motifs to reimagine practices of refuge and neighbor-love. Moving beyond abstract moral discourse, I argue that certain artistic engagements with trees and landscapes function as ecological mediators of hospitality, inviting viewers into forms of attention shaped by vulnerability, shelter, and shared creaturely dependence. By situating these works within broader Christian traditions, the work of Edith Stein, and the cross and the tree of life, the paper explores how visual art can cultivate an ethic of neighborliness grounded not in sentimental inclusion but in materially rooted practices of care amid displacement and environmental instability.
Return to the Roots: How We Move Forward
10th Annual Graduate Conference in Religion and Ecology Yale Divinity School | New Haven | February 20
Just a few days later, I’ll be in New Haven for the 10th annual Graduate Conference in Religion and Ecology at Yale Divinity School. This year’s theme invites participants to think carefully about what it means to return to roots… not as nostalgia, but as a disciplined attentiveness to the conditions that sustain life, meaning, and responsibility.
Learning to Be Addressed by Trees: Ecological Intentionality and the Practice of Attention
Abstract:
This paper develops the concept of ecological intentionality as a phenomenological framework for rethinking human relationships with the more-than-human world. Drawing on extended practices of field observation and tree-tracking, alongside phenomenological and process-relational thought, I argue that trees do not merely appear as objects of perception or symbols of ecological concern, but as addressing presences that shape how attention itself is formed. Returning to roots, in this sense, becomes a practice of learning how to be addressed by nonhuman life, allowing ecological encounter to reconfigure theological categories of agency, responsibility, and care.
Eternity in Time: Thinking with the Church through History
Christendom College History Conference Front Royal, Virginia | February 20–21
At nearly the same moment (and a short drive down I-81), I’ll also be participating in the annual history conference hosted by the History Department at Christendom College. This year’s theme focuses on how historical thinking shapes the Church’s capacity to inhabit time faithfully… resisting abstraction while remaining open to transcendence.
History as Empathic Ecology: Edith Stein and the Creaturely Horizon of Catholic Memory
Abstract:
This paper advances a Steinian reimagining of Church history as an empathic and ecological practice. Pope Francis’ recent call for a renewed study of history, one that resists “angelic conceptions” of the Church, opens the door to approaches that refuse abstraction in favor of embeddedness, vulnerability, and creaturely specificity. Edith Stein’s phenomenology of empathy, I argue, offers a methodological key for such a renewal. For Stein, genuine understanding arises not from detached analysis but from entering the lived interiority of the other, while still honoring alterity. When extended beyond the human, this empathic posture becomes a way of perceiving the Church’s history as a densely interdependent field in which human, nonhuman, and material actors co-constitute the conditions of its unfolding.
By bringing Stein into conversation with Hildegard’s viriditas, Leonardo Boff’s integral ecology, and my own work on ecological intentionality, the paper shows how Catholic historical consciousness can move beyond mere chronology toward what might be called ecological memory: an attunement to the more-than-human agencies, landscapes, and losses that have shaped the Church’s liturgy, art, mission, and doctrinal development. Case studies drawn from nineteenth-century missiology and the West’s encounter with Assyrian antiquities illustrate the costs of historical narratives that bracket ecological entanglement.
I contend that a Stein-inspired, ecologically thick historiography can form Catholic scholars, seminarians, and educators capable of embodying the ethical responsibility that Francis names, marked not by triumphalism but by cruciform solidarity with all beings across time. Such an approach reframes history not merely as what the Church remembers, but as how the Church learns to inhabit the world with humility, depth, and renewed evangelical imagination.
At first glance, these conferences may seem to occupy different disciplinary spaces… art history, ecology, theology, historiography. But for me, they converge around a shared concern: how we learn to see, remember, and respond within worlds that exceed us.
I’m grateful for the chance to think alongside colleagues in each of these settings, and I look forward to sharing reflections here as these conversations continue to unfold.
Over the past several years, much of my academic and spiritual work has been circling a single question… not first of ethics or policy, but of perception.
How does the world show up to us in the first place?
Contemporary ecological crises are often framed as failures of knowledge, governance, or technology. Those failures are real. But they rest on something deeper and more habitual: the ways we are trained to perceive the more-than-human world as background, resource, or raw material rather than as something that addresses us, resists us, and exceeds us.
The paper I’m sharing here, “Ecological Intentionality and the Depth of Being,” is an attempt to think carefully at that deeper level. It asks how consciousness discloses the natural world as meaningful… and whether that meaning is merely projected by us or grounded in the being of things themselves .
At the center of the paper is the concept of ecological intentionality. By this I mean the structure of consciousness through which the world appears not as neutral matter but as relational, expressive, and worthy of regard. Ecological intentionality is not an ethical stance layered on top of perception. It names the perceptual and metaphysical conditions that make ethical concern possible at all.
Philosophically, the paper stages a slow dialogue between two thinkers who are rarely brought into sustained conversation.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty helps us see how perception is not passive reception or conceptual construction, but an embodied openness to a world that already carries meaning. The body does not stand over against nature as a detached observer. It inhabits a lived field in which landscapes, paths, animals, and places solicit response, invite movement, and resist reduction.
Edith Stein, working from within the phenomenological tradition but refusing to stop at description alone, insists that what appears in experience corresponds to a real ontological depth. Finite beings are not exhausted by how they show up to us. They participate in being analogically, possessing integrity, essence, and contingency that are not conferred by human attention.
Held together, these two approaches allow ecological intentionality to be articulated as both phenomenological and metaphysical. The world appears as meaningful because it is meaningful… not because meaning is imposed upon it.
A key thread running through the paper is Stein’s account of empathy, understood not as emotional projection but as a disciplined mode of access to another center of being. While Stein develops empathy primarily in interpersonal terms, the structure she describes opens a way of encountering non-human life as possessing its own depth and integrity without collapsing difference or resorting to anthropomorphism. Empathy, in this sense, becomes an ontological posture rather than a sentiment.
This matters for ecological thought because it shifts the conversation away from mastery and toward recognition. If beings exceed our grasp, then perception itself must be reformed. Ecological intentionality names that reformation… a way of perceiving that is open, restrained, and attentive to finitude.
The paper does not offer an environmental ethic, a policy proposal, or a theological program. Instead, it tries to clarify the philosophical ground on which such projects stand. Before we decide how to act toward the world, we must first learn how to be addressed by it.
I’m sharing the paper here as part of an ongoing line of work that I’ve been calling phenomenological theology and spiritual ecology, and as a contribution to a larger project (my dissertation) titled Ecology of the Cross. I hope it proves useful to those thinking at the intersection of phenomenology, metaphysics, theology, and ecological concern… and I welcome slow, careful conversation around it.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about listening as we’ve navigated the holidays, Winter Break from school, family events, travel, and the everyday chores that demand our family’s attention. Not listening as a metaphor or as a communication skill. Listening as a way of being in the world.
Most of us are constantly surrounded by sound (especially those of us with young children!), but we listen to very little of it. We register noise. We filter information. We scan for what is useful, threatening, or affirming. That kind of listening is instrumental. It asks in advance, “What can this do for me?”
Ecological listening begins somewhere else. It begins with attention that does not yet know what it is for. I’m thankful for my black walnut friend for this guidance.
From a phenomenological perspective, listening is not passive. It is an intentional act. To listen is to allow oneself to be addressed. It is to let something outside the self take the initiative, even briefly. That is harder than it sounds. We are trained, especially in modern Western life, to approach the world as a set of objects to be managed, interpreted, or optimized. Listening disrupts that posture. It asks us to suspend our need to control the encounter.
This is why listening matters theologically. Before doctrine or ethics or activism. There is the question of whether we can be addressed at all.
Listening and Intentionality
Phenomenology reminds us that consciousness is always consciousness of something. Our attention is directed, but that direction can be narrow or wide, defensive or receptive. Edmund Husserl called this intentionality. Merleau-Ponty pressed it further by reminding us that attention is embodied. We do not listen from nowhere. We listen with ears, with posture, with breath, with a body situated in a place.
Edith Stein’s work on empathy adds another layer. For Stein, empathy is not projection or a weakness that many “podcast bros” or TikTokers proclaim in our modern context. It is not imagining the other as a version of myself. It is a disciplined openness to the reality of another as other. That discipline applies just as much to non-human life as it does to human relationships. Listening, in this sense, is not about understanding everything. It is about refusing to collapse alterity.
Ecological listening asks us to practice this refusal again and again.
Listening Beyond the Human
When I sit outside with the black walnut tree in my backyard, I am not listening for a message. I am listening for presence. The creak of branches in the wind and the uneven rhythm of leaves falling or squirrels navigating its trunk. The shift in bird calls when a hawk moves through the canopy. None of this arrives as information. It arrives as an encounter.
The temptation is always to turn these moments into symbols. The tree teaches patience. The hawk represents vigilance. The wind speaks of change. Sometimes those interpretations are beautiful and even true. But they can also become a way of not listening. Metaphor can be a shortcut around attention.
Ecological listening stays with the phenomenon longer than is comfortable. It notices how quickly the mind wants to label, interpret, or move on. It resists that urge. Not forever, but long enough to allow the world to remain more than our categories.
This matters because the ecological crisis is not only a technical failure, and we need to reframe our thinking and intentionality if we are to move ahead as a species. It is a failure of attention. We have become very good at seeing the world as a resource and very poor at encountering it as a neighbor.
Theological Stakes
The biblical tradition is full of listening language. Hear, O Israel. Let anyone with ears listen. The still small voice. These are not commands to acquire information. They are invitations into relationship.
Listening, in this sense, is kenotic. It requires a kind of self-emptying. To listen well, I have to loosen my grip on certainty, productivity, and mastery. I have to accept that the world does not exist, nor did it come into being primarily for my use or our corporate use as humans.
This is where ecological theology becomes concrete. Creation is not mute matter waiting for meaning to be imposed upon it. It is a field of address. To listen is to acknowledge that agency, vitality, and value are not confined to human consciousness.
This does not mean romanticizing nature or pretending that trees speak English. It means recognizing that the more-than-human world expresses itself in ways that exceed our interpretive habits. Growth patterns. Stress responses. Seasonal rhythms. Resilience and fragility. These are not metaphors for spiritual truths. They are realities that can form us if we attend to them.
Listening as Practice
Listening is not a mood. It is a practice. And like any practice, it requires repetition and restraint.
Here are a few ways I have been trying to cultivate ecological listening in ordinary life:
First, sit with the same non-human presence more than once. Not once. Not occasionally. Return to the same tree, creek, patch of ground, or stretch of sky. Familiarity deepens attention rather than dulling it, if we let it.
Second, listen without recording. No photos. No notes. No audio. Just the body in place. Notice how uncomfortable that can feel. Notice the urge to capture rather than receive.
Third, attend to sound fading into silence. Wind dying down. Birdsong pausing. Traffic thinning late at night. Silence is not the absence of sound. It is a texture of listening.
Fourth, notice how your body responds. Does your breath slow or tighten. Do your shoulders drop or rise. Listening is not just auditory. It is somatic.
None of this is dramatic. That is the point. Ecological listening trains us to value what does not announce itself loudly.
Why This Matters Now
We live in a culture that rewards reaction more than attention, from social media to news headlines to political donations and church sermons. Outrage travels faster than listening. Certainty feels safer than curiosity. But ecological life does not flourish under those conditions. Neither does theology.
If theology is going to speak meaningfully in a time of ecological unraveling, it cannot begin with answers alone. It must begin with the discipline of being addressed by a world that is already speaking, even when we are not listening.
Listening will not solve the climate crisis. But without listening, every solution risks becoming another form of domination.
To practice listening is to practice humility and empathy. It is to accept that the world is not exhausted by our understanding. That may be the most theological claim of all.
Yale Div’s Christian Wiman’s recent essay in Harper’s, “The Tune of Things,” arrives quietly and then stays. A family member sent it over this week, and I was embarrassed that I hadn’t read it yet, given how closely it moves with my own ideas I’m working on with Ecology of the Cross in my PhD work in Religion and Ecology at CIIS. It does not argue its way forward so much as it listens its way into being. What Wiman offers is not a solution to the problem of consciousness or a defense of God against disbelief, but a practiced attentiveness to the fact that experience itself refuses to stay neatly within the conceptual boundaries we have inherited or believe in.
Wiman begins with a claim that feels both modest and destabilizing to me. “Mind,” he writes, “may not be something we have so much as something we participate in.” That single sentence unsettles the familiar picture of consciousness as a private interior possession. It gestures instead toward a relational field, something closer to a shared atmosphere than an object locked behind the eyes.
This way of speaking feels deeply familiar to my own work, not because it echoes a particular school or theory, but because it names what many of us already sense when we attend carefully to lived experience. Consciousness does not present itself phenomenologically as a sealed container or neat set of ideas that we can wrap into a commodity. It shows up as an ongoing entanglement of body, world, memory, anticipation, and meaning. The question is not whether consciousness exists, but where it is happening.
Consciousness Beyond the Skull
One of the strengths of Wiman’s essay is his refusal to treat consciousness as either a purely neurological problem or a purely spiritual one. He draws on contemporary physics, biology, and psychology, not to collapse mystery into mechanism, but to show how poorly the old categories hold. When Wiman notes that “the more closely we study matter, the less inert it appears,” he is not smuggling theology into science. He is taking science seriously on its own terms.
This matters for ecological theology. If matter is not passive, if it is already expressive, responsive, and patterned in ways that exceed mechanical description, then the more-than-human world cannot be reduced to backdrop or resource. It becomes participant. Trees, animals, watersheds, even landscapes shaped by wind and erosion begin to appear less like objects we manage and more like presences we encounter.
I am reminded here again of my own work with what I have come to call ecological intentionality. Intentionality, in the phenomenological sense, is not about conscious planning or willpower. It names the basic directedness of experience, the way consciousness is always consciousness of something. What Wiman’s essay makes visible is that this directedness may not be exclusive to humans. The world itself appears oriented, expressive, and responsive in ways that ask for attention rather than control.
Physics, Poetics, and the Shape of Attention
Wiman is a poet, and his essay never lets us forget that. But his poetry is not ornamental. It functions as a mode of knowing. At one point, he observes that “poetry is not a decoration of belief but a discipline of attention.” That line is especially important in a moment when belief is often framed as assent to propositions rather than a way of inhabiting the world.
From the standpoint of religion and ecology, this matters enormously. The ecological crisis is not finally a crisis of information. We know what is happening. There’s peer-reviewed and well-established data. It is a crisis of perception. We have lost practices that train us to notice what is already addressing us. Poetry, like prayer or like phenomenological description, slows the rush to mastery and reopens the possibility of being affected.
Physics enters the essay not as proof but as pressure. Quantum indeterminacy, entanglement, and the breakdown of classical objectivity all point toward a universe that is less thing-like and more relational than we once assumed. Wiman does not claim that physics proves God. Instead, he allows it to unsettle the assumption that reality is exhausted by what can be measured. “The universe,” he writes, “appears less like a machine and more like a music we are already inside.”
Music is an instructive metaphor here. Einstein and his love of Bach would agree. A tune is not an object you possess. It exists only in time, in relation, in vibration. You cannot hold it still without destroying it. Consciousness, on this account, behaves similarly. It is not a substance but an event. Not a thing but a happening.
God Without Final Answers
One of the most compelling aspects of Wiman’s essay is its theological restraint. God is never offered as an explanation that ties things up neatly. Instead, God appears as the one who (what?) interrupts closure. Wiman writes, “God is not the answer to the mystery of consciousness but the depth of that mystery, the refusal of the world to be fully accounted for.”
This approach aligns closely with the theological sensibility I have been cultivating (for better or worse) in my own work. A theology adequate to ecological crisis cannot be one that rushes to certainty. It must remain answerable to suffering, extinction, and loss. It must make room for grief. And it must be willing to say that God is not something we solve but something we learn to attend to.
There is also an ethical implication here. If consciousness and meaning are not exclusively human achievements, then domination becomes harder to justify. The more-than-human world is no longer mute. It is not that trees speak in sentences, but that they address us through growth, decay, stress, resilience, and presence. To live well in such a world requires learning how to listen.
Ecology as a Practice of Listening
What stays with me most after reading Wiman’s essay is its insistence that attention itself is a moral and spiritual practice. “The tune of things,” he suggests, “is already playing. The question is whether we are willing to quiet ourselves enough to hear it.” Let those with eyes to see and ears to hear, and all of that.
This is where ecology, religion, physics, and poetics converge. Each, in its own way, trains attention. Ecology teaches us to notice relationships rather than isolated units. Physics teaches us to relinquish naive objectivity. Poetry teaches us to dwell with language until it opens rather than closes meaning (channeling Catherine Pickstock). Religion, at its best, teaches us how to remain open to what exceeds us without fleeing into certainty.
In my own daily practice, this often looks very small. Sitting with a black walnut tree in my backyard. Noticing how light shifts on bark after rain. Listening to birds respond to changes I cannot yet see. These are not romantic gestures. They are exercises in re-learning how to be addressed by a world that does not exist for my convenience. Seeing the world again as my six-year-old daughter does, with all of her mystic powers that school and our conception of selfhood will soon try to push away from her soul, sadly.
Wiman’s essay gives me language for why these practices matter. They are not escapes from reality. They are ways of inhabiting it more honestly.
Listening as Theological Method
If I were to name the quiet thesis running beneath “The Tune of Things,” it would be this. Theology begins not with answers but with listening. Not listening for confirmation of what we already believe, but listening for what unsettles us.
That posture feels urgently needed now. In an age of climate instability, technological acceleration towards the computational metrics of AI models, the extension of the wrong-headed metaphor that our brain is primarily a computer, and spiritual exhaustion, we need fewer declarations and more disciplined attention. We need ways of thinking that do not rush past experience in the name of control.
Wiman does not offer a system. He offers an invitation. To listen. To stay with mystery. To allow consciousness, ecology, and God to remain entangled rather than neatly sorted. That invitation feels like one worth accepting.
Obsidian has become my living archive since I first dove in back in 2021 as a classroom teacher where I organized teaching notes, conversations, and todos as a Dean of Students… and now it has become the place where course readings, dissertation ideas, phenomenological field notes, theological insights, Canvas posts, and draft papers all meet in a shared relational space. It’s less a filing cabinet and more a garden. What I’m really doing in Obsidian is tending connections by letting ideas compost, cross-pollinate, and eventually grow into papers or long-form reflections. Here’s the core workflow I’m sharing with you.
Two places where I’d start before you dive in to Obsidian:
When I read, whether it’s Merleau-Ponty, Edith Stein, Whitehead, or a text for PCC/ESR, I take notes into a Book Notes template that pulls in metadata automatically:
Author / Title / Year / Course
Core quotes (copied directly, tagged with #quote and citation)
My reflections in first person
Connections to other thinkers or my ongoing concepts: [[Ecological Intentionality]], [[Cruciform Consciousness]], [[Empathy (Stein)]], [[Flesh of the World]], etc.
Each book note ends with a section called “Where does this want to go?”
Sometimes the answer is a future paper, a blog post, or a concept node. That question keeps the note alive instead of archived.
2. Canvas Posts → Permanent Notes
I write most of my Canvas responses in Obsidian first. This lets me:
Draft freely
Link concepts as I’m thinking
Keep a permanent, searchable archive of every class discussion
Each module prompt gets its own note in my Canvas/ folder. After posting, I create 1–3 “permanent notes” distilled from the response—short, atomic ideas written in my own voice.
For example, a Canvas post on the chiasm leads to permanent notes like:
Perception as reciprocal touch
The ecological thickness of the visible
Relational openness in the phenomenology of nature
These then link outward into ongoing clusters such as [[Phenomenology]], [[Embodiment]], [[Nature as Intertwining]].
3. Writing Papers Through Connected Notes
When a paper is due, ecological theology, phenomenology, ESR or PCC research, I never begin with a blank page. I begin with a map of notes already in conversation.
The workflow:
Create a Paper Hub note as a central node for the project:
thesis draft
reading list
list of relevant permanent notes
Pull in linked notes Using Dataview or simple backlinks, I gather every relevant piece of thinking I’ve already stored.
Assemble the argument The writing becomes an act of weaving connections rather than inventing from scratch.
Export to Word/PDF Once the draft is complete, I move into Word for Chicago-style citations and final formatting.
This lets my academic work grow organically out of months of lived reflection rather than rushed, isolated writing.
4. Daily Notes as Phenomenological and Ecological Anchors
Every morning’s Daily Note includes:
weather + sunrise/sunset
tracking notes on the black walnut
dreams, moods, or somatic impressions
any quote or insight from my reading
These small entries, over time, become a longitudinal phenomenological dataset—especially helpful for my ecological intentionality and process-relational work.
5. The Vault as an Ecology
Obsidian mirrors how I’m thinking about the world in my CIIS work:
everything is connected, everything participates, and meaning emerges through relation rather than isolation.
My vault has three organizing principles:
Maps of content (big conceptual hubs)
Atomic permanent notes (ideas per note tagged well)
Ephemeral notes (daily, in-class, or quick captures)
The magic is not in perfect organization… it’s in the interplay.
6. Why This Works for Me
This workflow keeps my scholarship:
Ecological: ideas grow from interaction
Phenomenological: grounded in lived experience
Process-relational: always evolving
Practical: every note has a future use
It’s become the backbone not only of my life and coursework, but of my dissertation path, Tree Sit Journals, Carolina Ecology posts, and even sermon writing.
When I first entered into Edith Stein’s Finite and Eternal Being, I realized almost immediately that I was not reading a standard metaphysical treatise. I was stepping into a conversation about how being itself becomes available to us, how the meaning of existence slowly discloses itself through experience, relation, and attunement. Stein calls the book “an ascent to the meaning of being” in her preface and describes it as written “by a beginner for beginners” (Stein, Finite and Eternal Being, Preface). Yet the scope is anything but beginner level. She begins from the finitude that shapes every human life, our embodied and time-bound existence, and traces the ways it naturally presses toward an origin and fullness of being that is not our own. What strikes me is how this ascent mirrors what I am trying to articulate in The Ecology of the Cross. I am trying to understand how cruciform life opens us to deeper belonging in the more-than-human world, and Stein provides a metaphysical grammar for that movement.
Most of the visible universe is not solid, liquid, or gas. Instead, it is plasma, an electrified, dynamic, relational medium that shapes stars, nebulae, auroras, and the vast glowing threads between galaxies. Plasma is not a passive substance but a field that responds, organizes, circulates, and transforms, as far as we understand it, according to the classical model of physics (having been a Physics and AP Physics teacher for years). When physicists describe plasma, they speak of currents, waves, resonances, and instabilities with terms that sound far closer to phenomenology’s language of relations than to the inert mechanics of early modern science.
I occasionally get asked about my PhD work and why Edith Stein‘s The Science of the Cross(good article here) is such a big factor in my own thinking and research. I wanted to put together a quick overview of this incredibly important but under-read work.
Edith Stein’s Science of the Cross has become essential for my own work on The Ecology of the Cross because Stein refuses to treat the Cross as a mere doctrinal moment or as raw suffering. Instead, she approaches it as a structure of perception, a way of knowing and inhabiting the real. When she calls it a science, she means that the Cross forms a disciplined way of seeing or something that takes root inside a person like a seed and slowly reshapes how they relate to the world (p. xxvi). Reading Stein in this way helped me name what I’ve been experiencing in my own project in that cruciform consciousness isn’t just theological; it’s ecological. It’s a way of perceiving the world that emerges from relationship, participation, and transformation rather than abstraction. Her work gave me language for something I had long sensed, that the Cross can reorient the self toward the world with deeper attentiveness, humility, and openness.
Most readers of Pope Francis’s Laudato Si’ approach it as an ecological document. It is that, of course. It gives us the vocabulary of “integral ecology,” names theCry of the Earth Cry of the Poor (Leo Boff), and pushes Christians to confront the ecological devastation happening right in our backyards. But reading it alongside one of my favorite thinkers, Edith Stein (St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross), has helped me see the encyclical in a deeper light. It is not only a call for ecological reform. It is a call for a renewed way of perceiving the world.
This paper develops the concept of Integral Plasma Ecology as a framework that bridges physics, cosmology, and ecological theology through a process-relational lens. Drawing from Alfred North Whitehead’s cosmology, Teilhard de Chardin’s evolutionary mysticism, and Thomas Berry’s integral ecology, I propose that plasma, the most abundant and least understood state of matter in the cosmos, can serve as a metaphysical and theological metaphor for participatory consciousness and relational ecology. My background in physics education informs this exploration, as I integrate scientific understandings of plasma’s dynamics with phenomenological and theological insights from Merleau-Ponty, Edith Stein, and Leonardo Boff. The result is a vision of reality as a living field of plasma-like relationality, charged with energy, consciousness, and divine creativity.
One of those amazing thinkers and scholars who helped shape my own theological journey (first read her work as an Undergrad at Wofford College, and it both answered and provoked questions I had been and continue to wrestle with), along with countless others.
Dr. Trible’s scholarship reshaped biblical studies, insisting that the academy and the church confront both the beauty and the brutality of our sacred texts.
Through groundbreaking works—including God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality and Texts of Terror—she taught generations to read with literary rigor, ethical clarity, and courageous empathy. Her method of close rhetorical reading opened space for women and other marginalized people long silenced by interpretive traditions, and her teaching formed scholars, pastors, and activists who carry her insights into pulpits, classrooms, and movements for justice around the world.
We need to hear this in our Protestant churches in the United States every Sunday (and Wednesday and Sunday night and Tuesday during gatherings, etc.). Glad to see Leo taking on the ecological mantle from Francis.
Citing Francis’s text, Leo recalled that some leaders had chosen to “deride the evident signs of climate change, to ridicule those who speak of global warming and even to blame the poor for the very thing that affects them most.”
He called for a change of heart to truly embrace the environmental cause and said any Christian should be onboard.
“We cannot love God, whom we cannot see, while despising his creatures. Nor can we call ourselves disciples of Jesus Christ without participating in his outlook on creation and his care for all that is fragile and wounded,” he said, presiding on a stage that featured a large chunk of a melting glacier from Greenland and tropical ferns.
Great post from Merianna about relational being and our real need to have connections that will help us imagine our way out of our modern spiritual crisis in the context of Hurricane Helene…
Without thinking I asked, “Where you all right? How about your house? How about your neighborhood? Do you need anything?” The lost connection actually helped me search for connection with complete strangers. Suddenly, no one was irritated or frustrated waiting in line or waiting for a plug to charge what they needed. Instead we were all thankful to see each other.
A year later as I think about the way we as a community started to congregate in places that had power, I realized that this is what is missing. We have become so used to being connected all the time to news streams, events from around the world, and posts and comments that we have lost connection to the people we pass every day. We have forgotten that these connections are the connections that remind us that we are all God’s beloved children and we have all lived through something that has shaken us to our core.
On many mornings, I find myself sitting beneath the black walnut tree in my backyard, contemplating how an ancient abbess’s wisdom speaks to our ecological crisis. Hildegard of Bingen, 12th-century mystic, healer, and visionary, loved to talk about viriditas, the “greening” life-force of God in creation. She lived in a world where forests were alive with divine Light, and every medicinal herb carried a spark of God’s vitality. As a PhD student in Ecology, Spirituality, and Religion, I’m continually amazed by how Hildegard’s medieval insights resonate with what I call the Ecology of the Cross, ora theological framework that challenges our modern extractive paradigms with a vision of kenosis, interdependence, and sacred entanglement. In this post, I want to weave together Hildegard’s greening spirituality with the Ecology of the Cross, exploring how her ancient ontology can inform a Christian ecological lens today.
Hildegard’s Viriditas: Greening Power and Divine Immanence
Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) was a Benedictine abbess who saw the natural world lit up from within by God’s presence. Surrounded by the lush Rhineland forests, she perceived God’s “living power of light” energizing all creation, a verdant force she famously named viriditas, or greenness or greening power. In Hildegard’s theology, viriditas is the Holy Spirit’s life flowing through plants, animals, and elements, infusing them with vitality and growth.
“The greening power of the earth is the viriditas, which is the living light of the Holy Spirit… It is the love of God that flows through all creation, bringing forth new life and growth,” Hildegard wrote.
This was no poetic flourish for her; it was a literal cosmological principle. In her mystical visions, the entire universe even appeared as a tree, “verdant with God’s wisdom” and pulsing with divine life. For Hildegard, God was not a distant clockmaker but immanent in nature – present in the sap of trees, the humors of the human body, the cycles of the cosmos. All creation, she believed, is “alive with God’s presence” and thus sings a song of praise back to its Creator.
Crucially, Hildegard’s spirituality was deeply non-dualistic. She did not split spirit from matter. One commentator notes that she held a “theandrocosmic” ecology of life – a holistic view of reality as a dialogue between God (theos), humanity (anthropos), and the cosmos. This means Hildegard saw everything as interconnected as the health of the soul, the health of the body, and the health of the Earth were all of a piece. Indeed, Hildegard was a renowned healer in her time as a botanist and physician who composed texts on herbal medicine and the human body. She left behind volumes of wisdom on topics ranging from healthcare and natural remedies to music, ethics, and theology.
Her medical work (such as Physica and Causae et Curae) catalogued plants, stones, and animals, not just for their physical properties but for their spiritual virtues. In Hildegard’s eyes, studying nature was a way to understand God’s ongoing creative work. Healing a body with herbs and prayer was part of healing the ruptured relationship between humanity and creation. Divine immanence for Hildegard meant that the Creator’s power “flows through all creation,” so caring for creation was nothing less than an act of love for God. She warned that when we harm the earth, we harm ourselves, because we are inextricably part of this sacred web: “When we destroy the earth, we destroy ourselves,” she wrote bluntly. It’s hard to imagine a more ontologically rich affirmation of interdependence from the Middle Ages.
The Cross as Tree of Life: A Paradigm of Kenosis
Centuries before terms like “ecotheology” existed, Hildegard and her fellow medieval mystics were already linking the Cross with creation. In Christian symbolism, the cross of Christ has long been understood as a kind of Tree of Life. The New Testament itself refers to the cross as a “tree” (xylon in Greek which also refers to “clubs” throughout the Gospels interestingly enough) on which Christ was crucified (Acts 5:30; 1 Pet. 2:24). Early Christians couldn’t miss the irony of a wooden instrument of execution becoming the cosmic tree of redemption. Hildegard expands this imagery with her vision of the verdant universe. We might say her viriditas concept lets us imagine the cross not as dead wood, but as a tree greening with new life by God’s power. In one of my favorite poetic images, “even the cross, that ruined tree, bears sap enough to green the nations”… in other words, through the cross’s wood flows the viriditas of God, bringing renewal out of death.
This brings us to what I call the Ecology of the Cross. At its heart, this framework re-imagines the cross as more than a ticket to individual salvation; it is a paradigm of kenosis, interconnection, and humble participation in the wider community of creation. The Greek word kenosis refers to Christ’s “self-emptying” love (Phil. 2:5–8). On the cross, according to Christian faith, God-in-Christ empties Himself by pouring out divine love in utter vulnerability, even to the point of death. Traditionally, Christians see this as the path to resurrection and new life. But what if we also view it through an ecological lens? Ecology of the Cross suggests that the cross is “an ecological gesture of descent: a humble participation in the mutual vulnerability of the world”. In Jesus’ self-emptying sacrifice we see a model for how we humans should relate to the more-than-human world with radical humility instead of domination, willing to relinquish our privilege and power for the sake of healing relationships.
Such a kenotic ecology directly critiques modern extractive paradigms. Our industrial-technocratic society has often approached nature with an attitude of grasping and exploitation, the very opposite of self-emptying. Forests are logged and burned for profit, rivers are dammed and polluted for convenience, animals are driven to extinction for consumption or farmed for extracting nutrients in non-sustainable and ethically horrible ways. Creation bears the wounds of these extractive systems. In fact, we can literally see it in the trees: “forests today stand as cruciform realities: logged, burned, cut down, yet also central to the healing of the planet”. The cross, in an ecological sense, is present wherever life is suffering under unjust exploitation and wherever sacrificial love is bringing forth healing. The Ecology of the Cross invites us to recognize that the pattern of Christ’s cross, death and resurrection, is woven into Earth’s own rhythms. As I’ve written elsewhere, “the cross is ecological: a revelation of life’s pattern as death-and-renewal, as sacrifice-and-gift”. Every fallen forest that sprouts green shoots from its stump, every species brought back from the brink by compassionate conservation, every community that sacrifices for environmental justice… these are cruciform moments, little enactments of resurrection life.
Sacred Entanglement: Communion Beyond the Human
One of Hildegard’s gifts to us is a vision of sacred entanglement in a cosmos where everything is enfolded in everything else through God’s love. She spoke of the elemental interconnectedness of the four elements, the celestial bodies, and the human being (microcosm mirroring macrocosm). Modern science, with its talk of ecosystems and quantum entanglement, is catching up to this ancient intuition that “all beings are entangled in webs of relation”. Hildegard would agree wholeheartedly. And Christian theology adds: all those relations are grounded in God. Nothing exists outside the divine dance of communion. Significantly, Hildegard’s cosmology didn’t isolate humanity from nature; instead, she saw humans as integrated participants in the community of creation, “a world – everything is hidden in you,” she imagines God saying to each person, for the whole cosmos lives inside of us as we live inside it. This has profound ethical implications… if we and the earth are truly part of one living network sustained by God’s viriditas, then our calling is to nurture that network, to tend and befriend it, not to dominate or ignore it.
The Ecology of the Cross builds on this kind of sacred interconnectedness. It emphasizes that redemption is not apart from creation, but through it – through roots and branches, through crucifixion and renewal. In Jesus’ crucifixion, God doesn’t pluck souls out of creation; God enters into creation’s deepest pains to transform them from within. The Cross is God with us, with all of us, including the sparrows, the soil, and the stars. This is a profoundly metaphysical statement as it suggests that at the heart of reality (the metaphysical core of existence) there is a cruciform love that ties all things together in a bond of shared being. As theologian Catherine Keller might put it, there is an apophatic entanglement at work – a holy interweaving we only dimly perceive but are nevertheless a part of. Or as philosopher William Desmond would say, standing before a living tree draws us into “the between,” that threshold where mystery breathes through being. Such moments can feel sacramental. Indeed, in a sacramental worldview the material world mediates God’s presence. A forest can be a temple, a river can whisper divine truth. Hildegard, composing her ethereal chants to the viriditas of the Spirit, understood this well. The whole world was her monastery’s cloister garden, alive with God.
For those of us drawn to Christian ecotheology, to speak of sacred entanglement is to affirm what the Gospel has hinted all along: that Christ’s reconciliation “extends to all things” (Col. 1:20) and that creation itself eagerly awaits liberation (Rom. 8:19-21). We find ourselves, then, in a spiritual lineage that runs from saints like Hildegard straight to the present. “From the prophets to Jesus’ parables to Hildegard of Bingen’s viriditas… our tradition is rich with ecological wisdom,” as I’ve noted before on Thinking Religion. The task now is to live into that wisdom.
Kenosis, Viriditas, and Living in Communion
Bringing Hildegard’s mysticism into conversation with the Ecology of the Cross enriches both. Hildegard gives us the vibrant language of greening and the assurance that caring for the earth is an act of love for God. The Ecology of the Cross, for its part, gives us the challenging ethic of kenosis and the call to empty ourselves of pride, greed, and the will-to-dominate so that we can truly serve and commune with our neighbors, human and non-human. Together, these threads form a kind of cruciform ecology of grace as an approach to the environmental crisis that is both deeply spiritual and vigorously practical. It asks us to reimagine what sacrifice means. Instead of the destructive sacrifices demanded by extractive capitalism (where we sacrifice forests and futures on the altar of consumerism or chauvanism), we are invited into the life-giving sacrifice modeled by Christ and celebrated by Hildegard and a sacrifice that gives up self for the sake of renewed life for others. This could look like deliberate simplicity and restraint (a kenotic lifestyle that “lets go” of excess consumption), or like actively bearing the cross of ecological work in its many forms, whether that is replanting a clear-cut area, advocating for environmental justice in our communities, or tending a backyard garden as if it were an altar.
My own theological perspective is rooted in this integration of ancient wisdom and new vision. I’m convinced, as are many others, that our spiritual narratives and our ecological actions are inseparable. When Hildegard urges us to “participate in the love of God” by caring for creation, she is echoing the kenotic love poured out on the cross – a love that holds nothing back, not even life itself, for the sake of beloved creation. This perspective reframes Christian mission: it’s no longer only about saving souls, but about healing relationships across the web of life. It also reframes metaphysical and ontological questions. We begin to ask: What is the nature of being, if not being-with? What kind of world is this, if the Creator chose to wear its flesh and suffer its pains? Such questions lead us into what theologian Thomas Berry called The Great Work of our times and to rediscover ourselves as part of a sacred Earth community and to act accordingly.
In the end, Hildegard’s viriditas and the Ecology of the Cross converge on a message of hopeful, humble participation. Even in a time of climate upheaval, mass extinction, and social fragmentation, we’re invited to see the world with new eyes “to help people see differently and to recover the rooted wisdom of scripture and tradition,”as I often remind churches. We are invited to step into what the Benedictine tradition would call ora et labora, or prayer and work, on behalf of creation, joining our hands and hearts to the greening, healing work God is doing. The Tree of Life stands not as a mere symbol, but as an ongoing reality with the cross planted in the earth, drawing all things into divine communion. Hildegard’s lush visions and the Cross’s stark call both beckon us toward a future where humans live with reverence among our fellow creatures, where we embrace our creaturely limits and gift, and where, by God’s grace, the desert places of our world can bloom again.
As the farmer-poet Wendell Berry has said (in a line that often echoes in my mind when I gaze at a thriving green tree stump): “Practice resurrection.” A tree knows how. By the greening power of God and the self-emptying love of Christ, may we learn how as well.
I made some changes in my life back in May as my semester ended in my PhD studies and my dissertation began to take shape ahead of my 47th birthday.
We did lots of traveling as a family in June and July, I signed some new consulting clients, built a few websites, and had a wonderful summer of adventure. Those changes I made stuck and became routines and rituals. I slept well even in crowded hotel rooms and AirBNB’s in new cities with our children. I noticed my resting heart rate had dropped pretty dramatically.
Then August arrived and brought with it the annual torrent of new teachers and routines and meetings and after school activities and pick ups and drop offs and all things associated with having three young children. I noticed my heart rate had increased again. Things done and things left undone as the Book of Common Prayer reminds us to consider.
Talking with the Black Walnut this week, I’ve been pondering our own human conceptions of time and rhythm as I watch its leaves begin to silently fall here in late September.
I like to tell people that my dissertation (Ecology of the Cross) is my life’s work and that’s what I’m working on… contributing to Thomas Berry’s incantation of The Great Work of our time. Phenomenology has provided the structure for most of my research and thoughts as a part of all that work. Deep down, I realize (thanks to the Black Walnut and resting heart rates) that my life’s work is… my five children.
Maybe that dissertation will play some part in that in the future as they continue to explore, learn, and perceive the phenomena of consciousness and being in new ways. Planting sequoias for them and others who might be interested in what I have to say based on my aging heart and aging skin’s experience.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
I think of my aging heart and skin and my aging children and my aging theologies and philosophies. I turn back to Aristotle and Augustine and Hildegard and Edith Stein for answers while trying to look forward in a world of unease brought on by a spiritual crisis of being. And the Black Walnut reminds me in all of that consternation about time and aging that the cosmic dance goes on, ever turning and circling… not linear.
Not about monthly or quarterly trends or resting heart rates… but part of a much larger dance that we are somehow privileged to enjoy for a brief “time” as Humans. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep. This insubstantial pageant of modernity goes on, and we’ll return to the dust from which we were lovingly made. But heart rates and life (as we consider we know it) itself is a part of the cycle that spins forever and concrescing in little moments of magic that become us.
I danced on a Friday When the sky turned black It’s hard to dance With the devil on your back. They buried my body And they thought I’d gone, But I am the Dance, And I still go on.
Dance, then, wherever you may be, I am the Lord of the Dance, said he, And I’ll lead you all, wherever you may be, And I’ll lead you all in the Dance, said he
Sam introduces MinistriesLab, a space where faith, ecology, and ministry meet. Drawing on his background as a minister, teacher, consultant, and current PhD student in Ecology, Spirituality, and Religion at CIIS, Sam explores why churches need to embrace ecological spirituality as central to their mission.
From Thomas Berry’s vision of The Great Work to Hildegard’s viriditas and Edith Stein’s insights on empathy, Sam weaves together theology, philosophy, and practical ministry. Along the way, he offers concrete examples of what MinistriesLab can do for congregations: from rethinking digital outreach with ecological imagination, to planting pollinator gardens as acts of hospitality, to creating liturgies rooted in local watersheds.
This episode is both an invitation and a provocation: What would it mean for churches to “stay with the trouble” of our ecological moment (as Donna Haraway puts it) and to rediscover the Tree of Life in their own backyards?
For nearly two decades, my work has lived at the intersection of ministry, teaching, and consulting. From the pulpit to the classroom to boardrooms and coffee shops, I’ve found myself in spaces where the central question is always the same: how do we tell our story in a way that is authentic, transformative, and faithful?
Now, as I continue my doctoral work in Ecology, Spirituality, and Religion at the California Institute of Integral Studies, that question has taken on new urgency. The story we tell as people of faith is not only about our relationship to God and neighbor—it is also about our relationship to the more-than-human world that sustains us.
MinistriesLab was born out of the recognition that many churches and religious organizations feel the tension of our ecological moment but aren’t sure how to respond. Climate change, biodiversity loss, and the unraveling of ecosystems aren’t abstract scientific headlines, but rather they are spiritual questions, theological challenges, and pastoral realities.
Too often, churches either avoid ecological conversations because they feel “too political,” or they silo them into one-off “green team” projects. But the truth is this: our spirituality is already ecological. Every sermon, every communion table, every baptism, every hymn, every prayer is situated within a world alive with God’s presence.
My research in integral ecology and what I call the Ecology of the Cross has convinced me that the church’s voice matters profoundly here. Congregations have the capacity to help people see differently and to recover the rooted wisdom of scripture and tradition, and to step into hopeful, place-based practices of care and connection.
What I’m Offering
Through MinistriesLab, I’m bringing together my background in marketing and digital consulting, my years of ministry and teaching, and my ongoing academic work in ecological theology.
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
Consulting: Helping churches and ministries tell their stories more clearly online and in person, with strategies that are both practical and faithful.
Speaking: Preaching, teaching, and leading workshops on the intersections of faith, ecology, and communication.
Place-Based Practices: Offering insights and guidance for congregations to engage their specific local ecosystems, whether through worship, education, or community practices that deepen spiritual awareness of place.
A Theological and Practical Invitation
The church has always been at its best when it helps people see the world with new eyes. From the prophets to Jesus’ parables to Hildegard of Bingen’s viriditas (the greening power of God), our tradition is rich with ecological wisdom. What we need now is the courage to embody it in this time and place.
That’s the heart of MinistriesLab: to equip and encourage faith communities to embrace an ecological spirituality that is both approachable and transformative.
If your congregation or organization is ready to step more fully into that work, whether through a consultation, a speaking engagement, or exploring new practices together, I’d love to start a conversation.
Trees are older than us (though not as old as you might think), longer-lived than empires, and deeply woven into the stories we tell about wisdom and spirit. They are teachers of patience and endurance, bearing witness to countless centuries of human seeking. Our ancient and modern columns of brick, stone, marble, or concrete still pale in comparison to our ancient tree kin.
Across traditions, trees have anchored human imagination. They serve as symbols of wisdom, life, and connection. However, more than symbols, they are living presences, mediators of the sacred. From Genesis to the Bodhi Tree, from Yggdrasil to the cottonwood of the Lakota Sun Dance, trees appear where human beings grapple with the mysteries of being alive.
The philosopher Owen Barfield once suggested that human consciousness itself has a history, that the way we experience the world evolves over time. He pointed to the so-called Axial Age, when religious and philosophical traditions in Israel, Greece, India, and China reimagined humanity’s relationship to the cosmos. Trees appear in those traditions as if marking the shift: not just as backdrops, but as active participants in our emerging sense of meaning. They carry forward the memory of the older ways of knowing, when spirit and matter were inseparable, and they gesture toward futures in which we might relearn that intimacy.
To pay attention to the trees is to pay attention to our own evolving consciousness. It is also to listen to what Donna Haraway calls “tentacular thinking,” the recognition that all beings are entangled in webs of relation, that meaning itself stretches across roots and fungi and soil and sky. Trees remind us that life is not linear but branching, not heroic but networked. They embody what Ursula Le Guin called the “carrier bag” story of humanity: not a single plot driven by conquest, but a gathering of seeds, fruits, and stories carried in community.
Tradition
Wisdom
Life
Spiritual Connection
Hebrew Bible / Judaism
Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (Genesis); Etz Chaim (“Tree of Life”) as Torah/Wisdom (Proverbs 3:18)
Tree of Life in Eden and eschatology (Revived in apocalyptic visions)
Olive tree as Israel’s covenantal identity; sacred groves as contested spaces
Christianity
Cross as Tree of Life (Acts 5:30; 1 Peter 2:24); Hildegard’s viriditas (greening wisdom)
Tree of Life in Revelation (22:2) offers healing to nations
The Cross links heaven and earth; saints/monks often dwell in tree imagery of rootedness
Islam
Sidrat al-Muntaha (Lote Tree) marks the limit of knowledge (Qur’an 53)
Tree of Immortality in Eden (Q 2:35); olive tree as “blessed tree” (Q 24:35)
Trees as signs of God’s creation; paradise described as filled with shade-giving trees
Hinduism
Ashvattha (cosmic fig tree) in Bhagavad Gita represents eternal samsara
Banyan, neem, tulsi as living presences of the divine
Sacred groves; Bodhi tree as meditation site; cosmic tree with roots in heaven, branches on earth
Buddhism
Bodhi Tree: site of enlightenment, source of awakened wisdom
Trees as natural meditation sites; Bodhi tree as axis between ignorance and awakening
Indigenous Traditions (Americas, Africa, Celtic)
Oaks and yews in Celtic Druidic tradition as sources of sacred knowledge
Trees like baobab as “roots of life”; cottonwood in Lakota Sun Dance
World Tree as axis mundi (linking underworld, earth, heavens); trees as homes of ancestors/spirits
Norse Mythology
Yggdrasil’s roots drink from the Well of Mimir (wisdom)
Yggdrasil sustains nine realms of existence
Yggdrasil as cosmic axis, linking worlds; ravens, serpents, and gods interact with it
Chinese Traditions
Fusang tree marks sun’s rising, cosmic order
Peach tree of immortality (fruit of eternal life)
Sacred peach tree of Queen Mother of the West links heaven’s gifts with human fate
The Tree of Life in the Ancient Near East
The Hebrew Bible begins with a garden, and at its heart, two trees: the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Tree of Life (Gen. 2:9). To eat of the first was to awaken to wisdom — to the awareness of moral boundaries and human limitation. The story is often told as a fall, but it can also be read as the story of consciousness coming into its own, with trees as the threshold between innocence and maturity.
Proverbs later describes wisdom herself as “a tree of life to those who lay hold of her” (Prov. 3:18). Here the metaphor is clear: to live wisely is to be rooted, nourished, fruitful. In Jewish tradition, the Torah itself becomes the Etz Chaim, the Tree of Life, literally embodied in the wooden rollers of the scrolls used in worship.
But trees could also lead astray. The prophets railed against “sacred groves” where Canaanite deities were honored (Deut. 16:21). Yet, even this reveals the deep human instinct to find the divine among trees. And the symbol endures: the Book of Revelation imagines the Tree of Life restored in the New Jerusalem, its leaves “for the healing of the nations” (Rev. 22:2).
Christianity: The Cross as Tree
Christianity radicalizes the symbol by naming the cross itself a tree. The Apostle Peter writes that Christ “bore our sins in his body on the tree” (1 Pet. 2:24). A Roman instrument of execution becomes the world tree of redemption. The symmetry was irresistible to early theologians: where Adam and Eve grasped at fruit, Christ is lifted up on the wood, reversing the fall.
Medieval mystics expanded this imagery. Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) described divine life as viriditas, “the greening power,” pulsing through creation. In her visions, the universe itself was a tree, verdant with God’s wisdom. Monks, too, saw trees as ascetic companions: silent, patient, enduring through storms.
For Christians, then, the tree is paradox. It bears death and life, judgment and mercy, sorrow and redemption. Like Yggdrasil, gnawed by serpents but still sustaining the worlds, the cross stands at the center of human story… fragile yet cosmic.
Islam: The Blessed Tree
In the Qur’an, trees shape both warning and blessing. Adam and Eve are commanded not to eat from the Tree of Immortality (Q 2:35). Yet another tree, the Lote Tree of the Utmost Boundary (Sidrat al-Muntaha), appears in the Prophet Muhammad’s night journey. It marks the furthest boundary of created knowledge: beyond it lies only God (Q 53:14–16).
The olive tree carries special significance. The famous Light Verse declares: “God is the Light of the heavens and the earth… lit from a blessed olive tree, neither of the east nor of the west” (Q 24:35). Here, tree and light merge: the olive, ancient source of fuel, becomes metaphor for divine illumination.
Paradise itself is pictured as a garden of abundant, shade-giving trees — a vision profoundly embodied for people whose daily lives knew desert heat. The tree is not abstract; it is rest, sustenance, and divine nearness.
Hinduism: The Cosmic Ashvattha
In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna describes the universe as a cosmic fig tree, the Ashvattha: “With roots above and branches below, whose leaves are the Vedas; he who knows this tree is the knower of the Veda” (Gita 15:1). Unlike earthly trees, this one grows downward, its nourishment flowing from the eternal into the temporal. To attain liberation, one must cut it down with the “axe of detachment” and seek the source beyond appearances.
But trees are not only metaphors. Living trees are venerated: the banyan, with its aerial roots; the neem, with healing powers; the tulsi plant, tended in courtyards as a goddess in her own right. Sacred groves still shelter temples, holding ecological as well as spiritual memory.
The cosmic tree gathers together time, scripture, and existence. Like Barfield’s insight into symbolic consciousness, it points to a way of seeing in which reality itself is read as text, and trees as living letters of the divine alphabet.
Buddhism: Under the Bodhi Tree
Perhaps no tree is more famous than the Bodhi Tree under which Siddhartha Gautama attained enlightenment. Sitting through the night, he confronted desire, fear, and illusion until he awoke into Buddhahood. Ever since, the Bodhi tree has stood as the site of awakening: wisdom that arises not from conquest but from stillness, from simply being present beneath a tree.
Buddhism also speaks of the Kalpavriksha, the wish-fulfilling tree, symbolizing abundance. Yet the Bodhi dominates the tradition’s imagination, embodying the dharma itself: impermanence in its falling leaves, interdependence in its roots, patient endurance in its trunk.
Like Le Guin’s “carrier bag” theory of narrative, the Bodhi tree is not a hero’s monument but a gathering site. Pilgrims circle it, meditate beneath it, collect its fallen leaves. It is not conquered; it shelters. It contains, carries, holds the story of awakening.
Indigenous Traditions: The World Tree
In Native American cosmologies, the World Tree or Sacred Tree connects earth, underworld, and sky. For the Lakota, the cottonwood chosen for the Sun Dance becomes the axis around which the world is renewed. Dancers tether themselves to it in prayer, embodying the life-giving bond between human and cosmos.
In Africa, great trees such as the baobab and iroko are revered as ancestors themselves, places of gathering, storytelling, and ritual. The tree is not a metaphor for community; it is the community’s center.
Celtic Druids likewise revered oaks and yews, holding ceremonies in groves. Mistletoe growing on oaks was especially sacred, believed to embody divine vitality. These groves were what Haraway might call “tentacular nodes,” entangled sites of relation where human, animal, plant, and divine life braided together.
Norse Mythology: Yggdrasil
Norse mythology centers its cosmos upon Yggdrasil, the great ash tree. Its branches span the heavens; its roots drink from wells of wisdom and fate. Odin, in search of knowledge, sacrifices his eye at the Well of Mimir. Later, he hangs himself upon Yggdrasil for nine nights to gain the runes. Wisdom here is costly, rooted in suffering and sacrifice.
But Yggdrasil is under threat. Serpents gnaw at its roots, Ragnarok looms, yet the tree sustains all realms. It is fragile and resilient at once, much like our own ecological situation.
Chinese Traditions: Trees of Immortality
In Chinese myth, the fusang tree in the east holds the rising sun, anchoring cosmic order. The peach tree of immortality, tended by the Queen Mother of the West, bears fruit every 3,000 years, granting eternal life. Pines, peaches, and cypresses all became emblems of endurance, long life, and the Dao’s flowing balance.
Here again, trees bridge the human and cosmic, marking time’s rhythm and pointing to the way of harmony.
Wisdom, Life, Connection
Stepping back across cultures, we see three recurring themes:
Wisdom: Trees stand at thresholds of knowledge — Eden’s fruit, Yggdrasil’s well, the Bodhi’s silence, the Sidrat al-Muntaha’s boundary.
Life: Trees embody vitality — food, healing, shade, immortality. Their seasonal cycles mirror death and rebirth.
Connection: Trees serve as axis mundi, mediators of heaven and earth, ancestors and descendants, divine and human.
But with Haraway and Le Guin in mind, we can say more. Trees are not just vertical axes; they are networks. They are “carrier bags” of biodiversity, gathering species in their canopies and roots. They are “tentacular,” stretching mycorrhizal threads through soil, binding together whole communities.
If earlier ages saw the tree primarily as a ladder to the divine, perhaps our age can see tree as a web, and recognize in that web our own entanglement with the more-than-human world.
Religious traditions often use trees to point beyond themselves, such as metaphors for wisdom, life, and connection. But metaphysics reminds us that this pointing is not merely symbolic; it reveals something of reality’s very structure.
For Alfred North Whitehead, reality is not made of inert stuff but of events, relationships, and becoming. A tree is not simply a “thing” but a nexus of processes: roots drawing up water, leaves breathing light, fungi threading connections underground. The tree discloses the metaphysical truth that being is relational, that life is constituted by giving and receiving.
Edith Stein’s On the Problem of Empathy makes a similar point from a phenomenological angle: to encounter a tree is to recognize it as more than an object, but as a living subject with its own interiority, its own trajectory of growth and flourishing. The “tree of life” is not a metaphor we impose; it is a reality we meet.
This is where Owen Barfield’s insight comes in: the symbolic power of trees is not arbitrary but reflects the way human consciousness evolves in dialogue with the living world. We do not invent the tree-as-symbol; rather, the tree discloses meanings that consciousness gradually awakens to.
Conclusion: Listening Again
Religions around the world remind us that trees are more than scenery. They are wisdom keepers, givers of life, and cosmic connectors. They hold our evolving consciousness: from mythic imagination to axial philosophy, from medieval mysticism to today’s ecological science.
In a time of deforestation and climate upheaval, the old teachers still stand. They whisper lessons of rootedness, interconnection, and renewal. Perhaps the most spiritual act we can take is also the most practical: to plant, to tend, to listen.
The Ecology of the Cross: Cruciform Trees
If trees are life-givers, they are also sites of suffering. The cross itself was once a tree that was chosen, chopped down, shaped into an instrument of execution that was reused countless times in the Judean countryside of what we modern people of the inherited West would call the first century anno domini or Common Era. And yet in Christian imagination, it became the cosmic Tree of Life. This paradox lies at the heart of what I have been calling the Ecology of the Cross.
In ecological terms, forests today stand as cruciform realities: logged, burned, cut down, yet also central to the healing of the planet. The crucified tree is not only Christ’s cross but also the Amazon rainforest under chainsaw, the black walnut in my backyard enduring storms, the pines of South Carolina clear-cut for development, or the oak trees that are carefully manicured for aesthetic purposes in countless pieces of “property” surrounding churches here in what we now call the Southeast of the United States.
The Ecology of the Cross invites us to see cruciformity not only in human suffering but in the more-than-human world. Trees bear the wounds of our extractive systems, yet they also continue to gift us life: oxygen, shelter, shade, renewal. In this sense, the cross is ecological: a revelation of life’s pattern as death-and-renewal, as sacrifice-and-gift.
Here the metaphysical vision and the theological converge. To stand before a tree is to be confronted with both beauty and fragility, both gift and wound. It is to be drawn into what William Desmond might call the metaxological, the between, where mystery breathes through being.
So when religions speak of trees, whether as wisdom, life, or cosmic connectors, they are not only projecting human stories onto nature. They are intuiting something real about the metaphysical and theological shape of existence.
And in an age of ecological crisis, these intuitions call us back. To see a tree as a teacher is to see the world as sacramental, alive with wisdom and suffering, calling for care. To embrace the Ecology of the Cross is to recognize that redemption is not apart from creation, but through it… through roots and branches, crucifixion and renewal, leaves for the healing of the nations.
As Wendell Berry once urged, “Practice resurrection.” A tree knows how.
Notes
The Holy Bible, New Revised Standard Version (New York: National Council of Churches, 1989), Gen. 2:9.
The Holy Bible, NRSV, Prov. 3:18.
The Holy Bible, NRSV, Rev. 22:2.
The Holy Bible, NRSV, 1 Pet. 2:24.
Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, trans. Columba Hart and Jane Bishop (New York: Paulist Press, 1990).
The Qur’an, trans. M.A.S. Abdel Haleem (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 2:35; 53:14–16.
Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988).
Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (London: Ignota Books, 2019).
Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, corrected ed., ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1978).
Edith Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, trans. Waltraut Stein (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 1989).
William Desmond, Being and the Between (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995).
Wendell Berry, The Mad Farmer Poems (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2008).
Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, trans. Rosemary Sheed (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), esp. chs. on sacred trees and the axis mundi.
James Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1922), selections on tree cults and sacred groves.
Matthew Hall, Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011).
Thomas Berry, The Great Work: Our Way into the Future (New York: Bell Tower, 1999).
John B. Cobb Jr. and Herman E. Daly, For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989).
New here? Start with these pieces that sketch what I mean by “Ecology of the Cross.”
What is the Ecology of the Cross?
An overview paper that lays out the integral ecology of the cross and why kenosis + ecological intentionality matter.
Process Ecology of the Cross
A deeper dive into communion, kenosis, fire, and planetary politics through a process-relational lens.
Why Edith Stein matters here
How The Science of the Cross became the metaphysical and spiritual backbone of this whole project.
