“The Just Healing of God’s Creation for the Flourishing of All”
April 22, 2022
L. Robert and Marilyn McClean Chair in Ecological Theology and Practice Installation Address Given by Reverend Dr. Timothy Eberhart
In an 8th century account of the forced conversion of central European Saxons from a mix of nature veneration and folk Christianity to Latin Christianity, we are told that Boniface, an English monk, cut down an oak tree of extraordinary size to demonstrate the victory of the Christian faith over the detestable beliefs and practices of the pagan Saxons. Like indigenous peoples of every continent, the Saxons considered trees, groves, springs, animals, and elements from their environs to be sacred. As Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker note, in their book Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire, this particular oak likely represented Yggdrasil, the cosmic world tree, believed to have roots in the underworld and branches in the heavens, with the trunk inhabiting the middle earth of humans. Comparable to the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, this “abomination of desolation” (Matt. 24:15-16) was carried out by soldiers under Charles Martel, grandfather of Charlemagne, whose troops slaughtered masses of resistant Saxons, looted and burned communities to the ground, and forced baptisms under threats of torture and death.[i] This mix – of socio-psychological violence and ecological destruction – marked the spread of imperial Christianity across central and western Europe, as ecological historians note that the path of Carolingian missions among the Saxons coincided with widespread deforestation and the severance of people from cultural ties to the land and the cycles of nature.[ii]
It was spring 2014. I was speaking with a Lakota organizer, Carla Marshall, in Rapid City, SD, my home state, following a panel we were on at First United Methodist Church at the invitation of Garrett alum Rev. Peary Wilson. In the midst of our conversation, one in which I would first learn about the organizing efforts that would lead to the resistance at Standing Rock, she said to me: “You white people need to deal with your own intergenerational traumas. Our people are doing this work. But you European-Americans, you too were cut off from your old traditions. You too lost sacred relationship with the land. There’s so much violence in your histories. And until you find healing for your people, and peace with the land, your people are going to continue to do harm to us others and to the earth.”
My grandparents said we were Swabians, originally from central and southern Germany, which, DNA testing confirms, for what it’s worth. The Suebi – meaning “our people” – are first mentioned by Julius Caesar as a particularly fierce tribe because of their resistance against Roman military incursion – perhaps somewhat like the Maccabees a century before. Tacitus described the tribes of this entire central European region as living in kinship groups, with decisions made by the whole community rather than a single chieftain. For “the power of persuasion,” he wrote, “counts more [for them] than the right to give orders.”[iii] Their lands were held in common,[iv] and hospitality was lavishly shared between friend and stranger.[v] They celebrated women’s bravery in battle, and believed there is “something holy and an element of the prophetic in women,”[vi] something Tacitus saw as a sign of their cultural inferiority.[vii] Of their religious beliefs, he said, “they judge it not to be in keeping with the majesty of heavenly beings to confine them within walls or to portray them in any human likeness.” Rather, “they consecrate woods and groves and they apply the names of gods to that mysterious presence which they see only with the eye of devotion.”[viii] Of the Suebi in particular, he wrote that “they are distinguished by a common worship of Nerthus, that is, Mother Earth, and believe that she intervenes in human affairs and [moves among] their peoples.”[ix] Now, if you know me at all, you’re likely thinking: that sounds a lot like his people!
In the medieval period, following Charlemagne’s conquest and the rise of the Holy Roman Empire, the lands in this region would have been farmed by peasants, whose bodies and possessions were the property of feudal landlords. Each of these – land, labor, social hierarchy, and religious belief – were sources and sites of intense conflict. As Sylvia Federici describes, groups deemed religious heretics, like the Waldenses, Taborites, and Apostolic Brethren, rose up under conditions of landlessness, chronic debt, forced military service, and economic misery. Their theological denunciation of social hierarchies, the presence of women preachers among them, and their radical calls for the democratization of economic life were direct challenges not just to the nobility but also the Church, the biggest landowner in Europe at the time.[x] During the 14th to 16th century peasant rebellions, southern Germany was often ground zero of revolt. Here it’s worth quoting from the 1525 Twelve Articles of the Swabian League, considered one of the first drafts of human rights and civil liberties in continental Europe. Article 3: “Until now it has been the practice that we have been treated like serfs, which is deplorable, since Christ redeemed all of us with his precious blood, both the shepherd and the nobleman, with no exceptions. Accordingly, we hereby declare that we are free and want to remain free.” Article 10: “Many [nobles] have appropriated meadows and fields belonging to the people. We want them returned to all of us in common.”
Federici notes that it’s not an accident that the genocide of European peasants accused of witchcraft at the time of the emergence of capitalism was particularly severe where the rebellions were fiercest. To this day, demonizing a land-based people’s veneration of nature as primitive and evil serves as justification for their displacement from the land and even their eradication. Pagan, from paganus, just means of the country, rustic, rural. Women especially would have been the keepers of the old shamanic and animistic traditions. They would have passed on knowledge of healing roots and herbs, aligned with the lunar cycles, and because their daily lives and livelihoods were so intimately tied to the land, they often instigated and led the revolts. Many of the techniques of torture developed in this time, Federici says, were then adapted and amplified in the conquest of the Americas and the brutalization of enslaved Africans. So, at same time the European elite were profiting from the slave trade and the conquistador’s search for gold in the supposed “New World,” several hundred thousand peasants in Europe, it is estimated, were being tried, tortured, burned alive, drowned, and hanged, with a primary target being rural women.[xi]
Just a few centuries later, in the late 1700s – and this is where the ancestral story that I heard growing up begins – waves of Swabian Germans, mostly farmers and artisans, migrated to Bessarabia north of the Black Sea in what is now Ukraine and Moldova. Exhausted by the Napoleonic Wars, threatened by widespread famine, and inspired by the communitarian visions of Pietist theologians like Spener, Franke, and Zinzendorf – all figures who also inspired John Wesley – entire villages followed the Danube River southeast toward the Black Sea, where Catherine the Great had promised land, freedom from military service and taxation, and the ability to live out their religious commitments to democratic governance.[xii] And for about a century, they did, maintaining cultural continuity within relatively enclosed agrarian colonies. But beginning in the 1870s, with the Russian Czar’s imposition of universal military service for the lower classes, and with the passage of the Homestead Act in the U.S., another wave of migrations took place, one that included my great and great-great grandparents, who settled in the central Dakotas from the late 19th through the early 20th centuries.
Christian ethicist Melanie Harris says that the first step of an eco-womanist methodology involves the “process of uncovering one’s own environmental familial roots and spiritual connections,” by “investigating one’s family story and connection with the earth.”[xiii] I’ve shared enough that you shouldn’t be surprised to learn that I grew up in a family that highly values land, farming, the soil, gardening, and food preservation, that my dad is never happier than when he’s under the big Dakota skies walking the fields with his brothers, or that my mother was ordained a United Methodist pastor in the 1970s, not long after I was born, having been inspired by what she understood to be the call of the Spirit through the feminist movements of that time. Both are graduates of Evangelical Theological Seminary of the Evangelical United Brethren Church, which traces back to figures like the Wesleys, Spener, Franke, and Zinzendorf. I have been pleasantly surprised, the more I’ve learned about my ancestral roots, to discover that the eco-feminist, radical pietist, anti-hierarchical, and communitarian-socialist sensibilities of my adult years happen to run very, very deep. Actually, if you ask my parents about the time I staged a protest outside my mom’s office related to family chores, they’ll probably say those sensibilities were there from the beginning.
What also runs deep are many, many wounds, and a restless longing to be at home, in a place, among a community of people, with intimate cultural ties to the land. This longing, though, is not unique to me. All of us, each one, live in the aftermath of so many disconnections, so many estrangements, and so many traumas. Though the histories of our ancestral displacements are quite distinct, and although the resultant reconfigurations of power, access, and ownership are profoundly uneven, what we share, in our bodies and psyches, are grieved remembrances of being at home, once upon a time, in and with and of the earth. Eco-psychotherapist Francis Weller names this as one of the five primary gates of grief. It is the mourning, he says, often unconscious, of our connection with the natural world as the primal matrix out of which “our entire psychic, physical, emotional, and spiritual makeup was shaped.” We no longer live, he says, “with a sensuous intimacy with the wind, rivers, rainfall, and birdsong…The multicolored world of animals, plants, streams, hills, and sky has faded from our attention.” And in this loss, cut off from cultural traditions attuned to the cycles of nature and cut off from spiritual practices formed, like we humans, from the land itself, “we are left with a profound loneliness and isolation…we rarely acknowledge.”[xiv]
So there really aren’t any words left to name how bad it is. Ecological Armageddon. Climate Catastrophe. Biotic Holocaust. Another UN climate report comes out, and our young adult children text us: “I guess our generation can throw away those lists of favorite baby names.” A recent study of 16-25 year-olds worldwide found alarmingly high rates of “eco-anxiety” among our young people. “The countries with the highest proportion of respondents who felt ‘very worried’ or ‘extremely worried’…were the Philippines (84%), India (68%) and Brazil (67%), nations that have been hard-hit by climate change.”[xv] The most common emotions named were sadness, anxiousness, anger, powerlessness, and a prevailing sense that their urgent environmental concerns are being ignored by older generations. Our young people know. They know it in their hearts, their minds, and in their nervous systems.
Of course, there are the many numbers: 350, 1.5, 2, 2030, 2050. I’ve been teaching and workshopping on the numbers, charts, and graphs for over a decade, and what they point to and can illumine is important. But the growing accumulation of parts of carbon dioxide per million in the atmosphere is a problem that began in the alienation of humans from the material ground of our being. The accelerating rate of species extinctions, and the global deterioration of land, air, and water health, is ultimately about an estrangement from the plants, insects, animals, and elements who are our earthly kin. What the numbers reflect is a fundamental disconnect from reality.
And that is a theological and a spiritual problem, both of which are always political. To be more specific, the ecological crises we face are grounded in the centuries-long spread of imperial conquest justified by conquest theologies and conquest spiritualities. When John Stuart Mill wrote that “the ways of Nature are to be conquered, not obeyed” and that “her powers are often toward man in the position of enemies, from whom he must wrest, by force and ingenuity, what little he can for his own use,”[xvi] he was following Immanuel Kant’s determination that humans are under no moral obligation to plants, animals, and the elements of nature, because only rational beings, he believed, are worthy of moral considerability, whereas non-human life forms and inanimate objects “are there merely as a means to an end.”[xvii] Kant, thinking himself unfettered from Christian dogmatic influence, was of course perpetuating the prevailing medieval European cosmology of the Great Chain of Being in which humanity, just lower than the angels, rule over animals, who rule over plants, who rule over inanimate matter, which hovers just above nonbeing. Thomas Aquinas is representative, arguing that only the human, “has dominion over its own act,” whereas “every other creature is naturally under slavery,” such that it is not at all “wrong for man to make use of them, either by killing or in any other way whatever.”[xviii] As ecofeminists and ecowomanists have long noted, the Great Chain of Being, historically, has functioned to undergird social dualisms and hierarchies as well. Alongside the human/nature binary, dominant western thought has upheld the related hierarchal dualisms of male/female, mind/body, reason/emotion, free/slave, white/black, civilized/savage, each sanctioning endless manifestations of social inequity, violence, and oppression. As faculty emeritus Rosemary Radford Reuther, who taught at Garrett for over 2 decades, often quipped, “The Great Chain of Being is the great chain of command.” It is the logic of feudalism, but also that of the empires it followed, whether Roman, Greek, Persian, Babylonian, or Egyptian. And, it is the theo- or the cosmo-logic of global capitalism and its legion of intersecting supremacies.
To be freed from these chains, which now threaten the sustainment of planetary life in any recognizable form, we will need to break free from top-down, command-and-control systems and instead cultivate mutualistic, synergistic, and radically democratic worldviews and practices of deep solidarity. What Leonardo Boff calls “Socio-Cosmic Democracy,” or Vandana Shiva “Earth Democracy.” It’s not enough to deconstruct and dismantle. We must also actively seek the ways that make for peace – within ourselves, with one another, and with the land. Only then, Reuther affirmed, will we experience genuine healing. For “the liberating encounter with God/ess,” she wrote, “is always an encounter with our authentic selves resurrected from underneath the alienated self. It is not experienced against, but in and through [co-equal] relationships, healing our broken relations with our bodies, with other people, [and] with nature.”[xix]
Now, to be a creature is to be finite. And to be a finite creature is, at every moment, to inhabit a particular environs. The fact that we live dis-placed lives caused by centuries of alienating uprootedness does not alter this basic reality. Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s interpretation of Genesis chapter 3 is instructive here. It is the sin of Adam and Eve, he said, to attempt to become like God by placing themselves at the center, which is where only the Tree of Life properly belongs. But transgressing creaturely limits by seeking to be gods only causes estrangement, disorder, and explusion from the garden, followed by bloodshed, thorns, and sorrow. To be saved, then, means being re-situated, by being put back into our proper place as creatures oriented first and foremost not toward ourselves, incurvatus en se, or against one another, but in right relationship to the source, the Tree of Life.[xx] To quote Wendell Berry, it is in “understanding accurately [our] proper place in Creation” that we “may be made whole.”[xxi] And that cannot and will not happen abstractly or even globally per se. As my mentor Sallie McFague taught, although we are called to love the whole world, “no one loves the whole earth except [they] love a particular [place within] it.” It is impossible, in fact, to care for the earth “if one has never cared for [any part] of it.”[xxii] In other words, to be saved, we, the peoples of the earth, will need to become, as Wes Jackson has suggested, native to our environs.[xxiii] Our healing – socially and ecologically – will depend in part upon our becoming indigenous, again, to the many places we collectively inhabit.
Now, a word of caution. There will be no reconciliation with the land, or true peace in the land, apart from a truthful accounting of and a host of reparative responses to the histories of bloodshed that cry out – like the blood of Abel – from the ground.[xxiv] In order for my great great-grandparents to be granted land in North and South Dakota – the land which is the literal ground upon which everything I have been privileged to enjoy in my almost 50 years of life on this continent – and this was true for millions of European immigrants with respect to their farms, communities, businesses, churches, colleges, universities, and seminaries, in order for any of these to grow up from the land, first, there was the genocidal displacement of the first peoples – in this bioregion, the Ojibwa, Potawatomi, Ottawa, Mandan, Pawnee, Omaha, Sioux, and many more – and there was the fracturing of their cultural traditions, social structures, and sacred relationships to these places. First, there was the slaughtering of the buffalo, an “abomination of desolation” analogous to the cutting down of the sacred trees in old Europe. Then there was the Homestead Act of 1862, which granted these stolen lands to European immigrants, at the same time of the revocation in 1865 of the “forty acres and a mule” program in the South for liberated African Americans, which denied land, and thus accumulated generational wealth, social access, and political power to millions of black Americans. And there was the building of the transcontinental railroad across this region for transportation, for the sale of farm commodities, railroads built by Chinese laborers paid far less than European workers, forced to sleep outside or in tents, while others slept in train cars. The land still holds these grievous histories, and so many more, layers upon layers of geo-psychic hauntings and socio-material inequities. Were we to sit in place, and listen, deeply – and if just peace is our aim, we must – we would eventually hear the question the Lord God posed to Cain: “What have you done?” Listen, the blood of your kin cries out from the ground” (Gen. 4:10). What have we done? And what is to be done?
The mission of the Center for Ecological Regeneration is “to spread regenerative eco-theological understandings, earth-based religious practices, and cooperative solidarities for the just healing of wounded socio-ecological relationships in the Midwest bioregion and beyond.” The work of justly repairing the good earth for the flourishing of all will need contributions from all the world’s religious, philosophical, and wisdom traditions. We who are stewards of the Christian traditions have our own tasks. How have our theologies – about who and how God is, about what it means to be human, about the nature of sin and salvation, about this world and the world to come – how has Christian doctrine been complicit in the death-dealing logics and operations of conquest? But so too, what in our traditions – past, present, and yet-to-be claimed – might nurture a regenerative, a reparative, and yes a radical conversion of both social and ecological relationships at this Kairos time of multiple pandemics? And not just our beliefs, but our practices as well. How shall we baptize in water and the spirit in an age of runaway climate change marked by both draught and deluge? How will we gather together in table fellowships marked by loving relationships in an age of extreme excess and profound hunger? What forms of discipleship and spiritual formation will foster a deep reverence for the animating presence of God’s Spirit in all our relations? There are many who conclude that Christianity is too deeply enmeshed in the ways and means of empire to be of any earthly use. I understand, but I also disagree. I believe the resilient wisdom of the Jesus traditions, born within the context of imperial conquest and renewed in each generation by the Spirit of Life, from the ground, the grassroots, by the resurrecting spirit of uprising, has much yet to offer. But it’s also true that Christianity cannot and ought not to do this work alone. Neither should a center or a seminary or a denomination do this work alone. Our only hope is to join together, rooted in our respective places, in deeply cooperative solidarities – interracial, multi-ethnic, ecumenical, interfaith, interspiritual, inter-national, and interspecies solidarities. This is the work ahead.
Let me conclude with this. Around the time of Charlemagne’s death, amidst continued Saxon resistance to the colonialization of their native ways of life, an unknown Saxon author crafted a retelling of the Gospel stories in a poem called the Heliand, which means “Healer.” In it, Christ is described as “the Best of healers, come to the middle world to be a help to many” (Song 1), and he’s given the name drohtin, which is the term used for the tribal chieftain, who rules well, remember, not by giving orders, but through the power of persuasion (Song 5). Throughout the poem, the primary beneficiaries of Jesus’ ministry are peasants, and the story of Herod’s slaughter of the innocents clearly parallels the Saxon’s sufferings under Charlemagne. “The king’s warrior-companions did this horrible deed,” it tells. “Never before or since has there been a more tragic departure for young persons…The murderers…didn’t think a thing about the evil they were doing” (Song 11). In the telling of the crucifixion, the cross is erected on sandy gravel, the native landscape of the North Sea. The cross itself on which “the Best of all healers” hung, by rope, is called a tree (Song 66), a clear reference to the cosmic tree at the axis of world, the one Boniface had cut down, and the one Woden had hung on for 9 days, by rope, at the end of the world (Ragnarök). Jesus’ followers bury his body in a Saxon grave – an earthen mound covered by a stone slab (song 67) – a depiction written in clear defiance of the Carolingian law against pagan burial practices. On the day of resurrection, the spirit, the holy breath, it says, bypasses the soldiers guarding the grave and, as “God’s child of peace” is raised up, his garment like “winter-cold snow,” the locks and bars of the underworld are broken, and the road to the green fields of paradise is opened, the bifrost in Nordic myth, a rainbow bridge joining heaven to earth (Song 68).[xxv]
We followers of Jesus who seek to become native again to our respective places are invited, I would suggest, to follow a similar path. By throwing off conquest theologies, supremacist spiritualities, and colonial forms of governance in all their anti-democratic, command-and-control forms. By seeking healing for our bodies, for our psyches, and for our ancestors, as we make just amends, ceremonial offerings if you will, in repentance of their sins and in recognition of the sufferings they endured and passed on to others. By re-membering and preserving the old knowledges, the indigenous wisdoms of every continent, of how to dwell rightly, reverently, in the land, and by teaching them to our young people, to give them hope, and to our children’s children, to the seventh generation. In a place like this, at Garrett, on behalf of Christian traditions pursuing justice and peace worldwide, that may mean drawing inspiration from the Saxon Savior alongside Jame’s Cone’s Black Messiah, the Corn Mother Christ of Native American Christianity[xxvi] with the Jesus M’agyenkwa of African indigenous Christianity,[xxvii] the Buddha Christ and Krishna Jesus of Asia[xxviii] with the Chacana Christ of South America, envisaged as the cosmic cross linking East to West, North to South, as the transcendent-animistic-human one at the center of the great medicine wheel of life.[xxix] All together, in and through the Spirit, a rainbow bridge of healing Christianities, offered alongside other paths, other ways, to guide us from where now are, truly at the end of the world, to the many paradises on this good earth that can still be our sacred home.
May it be so.
[i] Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker, Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2008), 225-233. As a contemporary poet wrote, “What the contrary mind and perverse soul refuse to do with persuasion, Let them leap to accomplish when compelled by fear.” Mary Garrison, “The Emergence of Carolingian Latin Literature and the Court of Charlemagne (780–814),” Carolingian Culture: Emulation and Innovation, ed. Rosamond McKitterick (Cambridge, 1994), 133.
[ii] See Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200-1000, 2nd Edition (The Making of Europe) 2nd Edition (Wiley-Blackwell, 2003): “It seems to me that the most marked feature of the rise of the Christian church in western Europe was the imposition of human administrative structures … at the expense of the landscape itself. St. Martin attacked those points at which the natural and divine were held to meet: he cut down the sacred trees, and he broke up the processions that followed the immemorial lines between the arable and the non-arable. His successors fulminated against trees and fountains, and against forms of divination that gained access to the future through the close observation of the vagaries of animal and vegetable life. They imposed rhythms of work and leisure that ignored the slow turning of the sun, the moon, and the planets through the heavens, and that reflected, instead a purely human time, linked to the deaths of outstanding individuals. What is at stake in sixth-century Gaul… is nothing less than a conflict of views on the relations between man and nature” (124-125).
[iii] Tacitus, “Germania,” in Agricola and Germany, Oxford World Classics (Oxford University Press, 1999), 43.
[iv] Ibid., 50.
[v] Ibid., 49.
[vi] Ibid., 41.
[vii] Ibid., Of a tribe ruled by a woman, he wrote: “They have fallen lower not merely than free men but than slaves,” 61.
[viii] Ibid., 42.
[ix] Ibid., 58.
[x] Silvia Federici, Caliban the Witch: Women, The Body and Primitive Accumulation (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2004), pp. 31-36
[xi] Federici, 169. See also: “The counterparts of the typical European witch, then, were…the colonized native Americans and the enslaved Africans who, in the plantations of the “New World,” shared a destiny similar to women in Europe, providing for capital the seemingly limitless supply of labor necessary for accumulation,” 198. And also: “It would be a mistake…to conclude that the integration of slave labor in the production of the European wage proletariat created a community of interests between European workers and the metropolitan capitalists…In reality, like the Conquest, the slave trade was an epochal misfortune for European workers…Let us remember that it was the intensity of the anti-feudal struggle that instigated the lesser nobility and the merchants to seek colonial expansion, and that the conquistadors came from the ranks of the most-hated enemies of the European working class. It is also important to remember that the Conquest provided the European ruling class with the silver and gold used to pay the mercenary armies that defeated the urban and rural revolts; and that, in the same years when the Arawaks, Aztecs, and Incas were being subjugated, workers in Europe were being driven from their homes, branded like animals, and burnt as witches,” 105.
[xii] Ute Schmidt, translated by James T. Gessele, edited by Elvire Necker-Eberhardt, Nancy Herzog, and Alexander Herzog, Bessarabia: German Colonists on the Black Sea (Fargo, ND: Germans from Russia Heritage Collection, North Dakota State University Libraries, 2011), 6-11.
[xiii] Melanie L. Harris, Ecowomanism: African American Women and Earth-Honoring Faiths (Orbis Books, 2017), 7.
[xiv] Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief (North Atlantic Books, 2015), 49-52.
[xv] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02582-8
[xvi] John Stuart Mill, On Nature (New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1970), 20.
[xvii] Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics (London: Taylor and Francis Books, 1930), 239.
[xviii] Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Contra Gentiles, Part II, Book 3, Chapter CXII (London: Burns, Oates & Washbourne Ltd., 1928), 88-92.
[xix] Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology (1983)
[xx] See Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall: A Theological Exposition of Genesis 1-3 (Fortress Press, 2004).
[xxi] Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1977), 98.
[xxii] Sally McFague, Super, Natural Christians: How We Should Love Nature (Augsburg Fortress Press, 1997), 26-27.
[xxiii] Wes Jackson, Becoming Native to This Place (Counterpoint, 1996).
[xxiv] See Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Harvard University Press, 2011): “The environmentalist advocacy of an ethics of place” and the “literature associated with bioregionalism tends toward a style of spiritual geography that is premised on…spatial amnesia,” which “has all too often [reflected] hostility toward displaced people,” both past and present, 238-239.
[xxv] See G. Ronald Murphy, S.J., The Saxon Savior: The Germanic Transformation of the Gospel in the Ninth-Century Heliand (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). See also Nakashima Brock and Parker, Saving Paradise, 240-248.
[xxvi] See Clara Sue Kidwell, Homer Noley, and George E. Tinker, Native American Theology (Orbis Books, 2001).
[xxvii] See Mercy Amba Oduyoye, Beads and Strands: Reflections Of An African Woman On Christianity In Africa (Orbis Books, 2004).
[xxviii] See R. S. Sugirtharajah, ed., Asian Faces of Jesus (Orbis Books, 1993).
[xxix] See Nicanor Sarmiento Tupayupanqui, O.M.I., Andean Christian Theologies, Elements of a Rainbow of Theological Voices of the Indigenous Peoples of Abya Yala: A Missiological and Anthropological Study of the Andea Trilogy, Dissertation, Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, CA, 2011, 215-116.