This Tuesday is Mardi Gras or “Fat Tuesday,” the last day before Lent (the season of fasting and prayer leading up to Easter on the Christian calendar). On Mardi Gras, many people gather for big events called Carnival: eating, dancing, and making merry. Historically, this Christian festival provides a means to purge perishable items before…
A recent edition of the Anglican Theological Review focused on water, and included an article on watershed discipleship by Ched Myers: “Prophetic Visions of Redemption as Rehydration: A Call to Watershed Discipleship” (see abstract here). The volume also includes a number of sermons, poems, and other theological expositions around the theme of water. Though the…
On Sunday morning, as part of our celebration of the MLK Day weekend, we commemorated the 50th anniversary of the destruction of the site of the Asistencia Santa Gertrudis a few miles from our home, where a small Chumash village survived between 1830 and 1865, giving the name “Casitas” to the area. After a hurried…
The latest issue of Orion Magazine, a special 35th anniversary edition, contains several articles that may be of interest to those practicing watershed discipleship, such as “Women and Standing Rock: where does the body end and sacred nature begin?” by Layli Long Soldier (this page contains a number of articles, poems, and photos on a…
A beautiful, relatively smoke-free week in early fall greeted Presbyterians and others from across the country as they gathered at Menucha Retreat & Conference Center on the Oregon side of the Columbia River Gorge the last week of September. After an unauthorized firecracker sparked the Eagle Creek fire in early September about 20 miles east…
“We are doing this discipleship; we are disciples of this watershed!” A woman named Beatriz Fernández de Hütt exclaimed the above quote during her presentation at a workshop on the Spanish translation of the watershed discipleship book. She leads a group called Amigos del Rio Torres that works to clean up the river running through…
A new primer about watershed discipleship in Spanish was released this week, thanks to a team at Universidad Biblica Latinoamericana in San Jose, Costa Rica. You can order Discipulado de la Cuenca: Una introduccion a la fe y la practica biorregionales here. Interest in watershed discipleship is spreading in Latin America, and Manuel Casal Lodeiro has been…
by Todd Wynward Imagine the U.S. government confiscating your beautiful local church building and grounds and turning its worship space into a public park. Imagine dune buggies and picnickers and diesel engines and fast-food wrappers. Imagine the sanctuary Sunday morning trashed, a victim of the party the night before. Unimaginable? You bet. But that’s essentially…
by Cherice Bock and Solveig Nilsen-Goodin On Earth Day, April 22, 2017, we planted 150 trees at Eloheh Farm. Three groups worked together to make this happen: North Valley Friends Church, the Wilderness Way Community, and Eloheh. Solveig Nilsen-Goodin is the pastor of the Wilderness Way Community in Portland, OR, and she had the seed…
by Vickie Machado Recently, young adults hailing from the Willamette Watershed in Oregon to the Biscayne Bay Watershed in Florida gathered in Virginia’s James River Watershed to partake in the 10th annual Eco-Stewards Program, a grassroots community that shapes young adult leaders through place-based experiences that connect faith and the environment. Each year, Eco-Stewards organizes…