1. For an overview of the crisis see Leslie Roberts, et al, World Resources 1998-99: A Guide to the Global Environment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998) and Jeremy Rifkin, Biosphere Politics: A Cultural Odyssey from the Middle Ages to the New Age (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991).
2. Lynn White, Jr., "The Historic Roots of Our Ecological Crisis," Science 155 (1967): 1203-1207.
3. White, "The Historic Roots of Our Ecological Crisis," 1205.
4. On Jung's position concerning the spiritual origins of alcoholism, see Ernest Kurtz, "Twelve Step Programs," in Spirituality and the Secular Quest, ed. Peter H. Van Ness (New York: Crossroad, 1996), 277-302.
5. The classical articulations of the "bondage of the will" are Augustine, "The Spirit and the Letter," in Augustine: Later Works, trans. and ed. John Burnaby, Library of Christian Classics (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1955), and Martin Luther, The Bondage of the Will, trans. Henry Cole (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1976).
6. In this regard, the role of market-driven media in shaping public perceptions of nature is critical. A quick perusal of most magazines at any local supermarket will reveal a rash of clever advertisements by major polluting industries touting their environmental credentials. Is it really credible to believe, as one global oil company contends in its adds, that offshore drilling platforms are environmentally benign habitat enclosures for a variety of sea creatures? On the use and abuse of "nature" in global media, see Susan G. Davis, "Touch the Magic," in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: Norton, 1995), 204-17, Judith Williams, Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising (New York: Marion Byars, 1984), and Raymond Williams, "Ideas of Nature," in his Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: Verso, 1980).
7. In recent years, there has been a surge of interest in Spirit-discourse from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Many of these works have been essential to my own thinking about the Spirit in nature in this book. In theology, see José Comblin, The Holy Spirit and Liberation, trans. Paul Burns (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1989), Peter C. Hodgson, Winds of the Spirit: A Constructive Christian Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994), Adolf Holl, The Left Hand of God: A Biography of the Holy Spirit, trans. John Cullen (New York: Doubleday, 1998), Chung Hyun-Kyung, "Welcome the Spirit; Hear Her Cries: The Holy Spirit, Creation, and the Culture of Life," Christianity and Crisis 51 (July 15, 1991): 220-23, Elizabeth A. Johnson, She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse (New York: Crossroad, 1992), Jürgen Moltmann, God in Creation: A New Theology of Creation and the Spirit of God, trans. Margaret Kohl (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985), idem, The Spirit of Life: A Universal Affirmation, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), idem, The Source of Life: The Holy Spirit and the Theology of Life, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), Geiko Müller-Fahrenholz, God's Spirit: Transforming a World in Crisis, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1995), Nancy Victorin-Vangerud, The Raging Hearth: Spirit in the Household of God (St. Louis, Mo.: Chalice Press, 2000), and Michael Welker, God the Spirit, trans. John F. Hoffmeyer (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994); in philosophy, see Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), idem, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kampf (New York: Routledge, 1994), and Steven G. Smith, The Concept of the Spiritual: An Essay in First Philosophy (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988); and in cultural studies, see Joel Kovel, History and Spirit: An Inquiry into the Philosophy of Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991).
8. In this vein let me make some stylistic comments about writing the Spirit. Throughout this essay I will capitalize "Spirit" in order to distinguish the divine personality (Holy Spirit or Spirit of the Lord) from other similar spirit-term significations (spirit of the times, public spirit, and so forth). Nevertheless, I suggest that the realities of Spirit and spirit should often be viewed as active on the same continuum, as when, for example, the Spirit of God empowers the embattled spirit of an urban community to resist the forces of ecocidal oppression (as I will suggest below in my discussion of Chester, Pennsylvania). I also use the female pronoun for the Spirit in order rhetorically to realize aspects of the transgressive freedom the Spirit promises, including the freedom to complicate and confuse her/his/its gender. This complication is not original to me: grammatically speaking, the term for Spirit in Hebrew is feminine (rûah), neuter in Greek (pneuma), and masculine in Latin (spiritus) and its derivative Romance languages. For the history of woman-identified language for the Spirit, see Susan Ashbrook Harvey, "Feminine Imagery for the Divine: the Holy Spirit, the Odes of Solomon, and Early Syriac Tradition," St. Vladimir's Theological Quarterly 37 (1993): 111-40, Gary Steven Kinkel, Our Dear Mother the Spirit: An Investigation of Count Zinzendorf's Theology and Praxis (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1990), and Johnson, She Who Is, 128-31.
9. This definition is from the entry on "spiritus" by Richard A. Muller, Dictionary of Latin and Greek Theological Terms (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Book House, 1985), 286.
10. The literature on this question is extensive. See inter alia Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991), Susan Griffin, Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), and William R. LaFleur, "Body," in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 36-54.
11. Plato Timaeus 42-49, 89-92.
12. Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 160-89.
13. Augustine The Confessions 7-8. Also see Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 158-81, 340-97, and Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (New York: Random House, 1988), 98-154.
14. On Paul's anthropology, see J. Christiaan Beker, Paul the Apostle: the Triumph of God in Life and Thought (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980), 213-302.
15. Basil of Caesarea De Spiritu Sancto bk. 16.
16. Augustine De Trinitate bk. 15.
17. For reproductions and commentary, see Jeffrey F. Hamburger, The Rothschild Canticles: Art and Mysticism in Flanders and the Rhineland Circa 1300 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 118-42. I am grateful to Ellen Ross for directing my attention to this volume.
18. Perichoresis is the doctrine that teaches the coinherence of each member of the Trinity in the other. For a fuller discussion of this term and its relevance to contemporary theology, see Catherine Mowry LaCugna, God For Us: The Trinity and Christian Life (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), 270-78.
19. There are notable exceptions to this general orientation (for example, Chung Hyun-Kyung, Johnson, Moltmann, Welker), but most other contemporary theologies of the Holy Spirit generally deemphasize, or ignore altogether, the model of the Spirit as God's power of ecological renewal and healing within the cosmos. This shortcoming applies to a number of otherwise invaluable books in pneumatology, including Yves M. J. Congar, I Believe in the Holy Spirit, trans. Geoffrey Chapman, 3 vols. (New York: Seabury Press, 1983), Alasdair I. C. Heron, The Holy Spirit: The Holy Spirit in the Bible, the History of Christian Thought, and Recent Theology (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1983), G. W. H. Lampe, God as Spirit (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), and John V. Taylor, The Go-Between God: The Holy Spirit and the Christian Mission (London: SCM Press, 1972). As well, the writings on the Spirit in the important systematic theologies of authors such as Barth, Rahner, and Tillich reflect a similar lacuna, though this oversight is understandable given the general lack of cultural awareness of the ecocrisis at the time these authors were writing. (This anachronistic qualification applies to some of the other writers listed above as well.)
20. See Jürgen Moltmann's The Spirit of Life, 274-89, and his model of the Spirit as the vita vivificans who sustains all creation, and James E. Lovelock's Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979) in defense of the model of the earth as a single living organism which supports all life-forms within a common ecosystem. Regarding the problems with Moltmann's nature theology, see my "The Wild Bird Who Heals: Recovering the Spirit in Nature," Theology Today 50 (1993): 13-28.
21. See inter alia Edward Farley, Divine Empathy: A Theology of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), Joseph Halloran, The Descent of God: Divine Suffering in History and Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), and Grace Jantzen, God's World and God's Body (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1984).
22. Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God, trans. R. A. Wilson and John Bowden (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 244.
