Please join us in an exploration of urban ecospirituality with Dr. Rachel Wheeler.

More than half of humans alive today live in cities and this number is projected to grow throughout the century. We need to develop a healthy ecospirituality that enables us to live well together and with neighboring species of all kinds. This presentation draws on the transition town movement and on familiar and less well-known stories of Francis of Assisi's life, in order to evoke an urban ecospirituality that will help us shape our city lives into lives of creativity and compassion, ensuring a human-friendly future.

Dr. Wheeler's presentation will be followed by time for Q&A.

Rachel Wheeler is Associate Professor of Spirituality at the University of Portland in Portland, Oregon where she teaches on Bible, ecospirituality, and spirituality and the arts. She is author of three books: Desert Daughters, Desert Sons: Rethinking the Christian Desert Tradition; Ecospirituality: An Introduction; and Radical Kinship: A Christian Ecospirituality. She prays and preaches at Saint Andrew Catholic Church in Portland, Oregon, and is a longtime vegan, public transit user, knitter, and poet.

Click here to register now: 

https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_myBZqAa7QxG5PsPjOCURzQ

The event is being hosted by the Franciscan Peace Center and is co-sponsored by the Franciscan Action Network; the Sisters of St. Francis, Dubuque, Iowa; the Sisters of Charity, BVM Leadership Team; and the Sisters of St. Francis Rochester, Minnesota.

Dr. Wheeler’s book, Radical Kinship: A Christian Ecospirituality is available now from Fortress Press.

What does it mean to live in harmony with all of God's creation? How might our spiritual practice contribute to the healing of this place we call home, and to our own healing along the way? Rachel Wheeler offers compelling testimony for the value--and the life-giving power--of "rewilding." For conservationists, rewilding is a strategy of human restraint, of letting the wild enact ecological repair on its own terms. The "wild" is a quality of life beyond the control of the human. For Christians, a rewilding spirituality restores the life-generating and life-sustaining norms in which we were created to dwell.

Radical Kinship: A Christian Ecospirituality provides readers with both theoretical foundations for understanding a rewilded Christian spirituality for the twenty-first century and practical strategies for rewilding our own lives. Wheeler brings biblical foundations and the history of Christian spirituality into conversation with environmental ethics, ecopsychology, and ecopoetics. The frameworks she constructs bring Christian spiritual tradition back to its deepest foundations not only as a product of human culture, but as one shaped in large part by Christians in relationship with other-than-human members of the Earth community.