CLICK HERE FOR THE PAPERBACK VERSION!
The content of this manuscript was originally delivered as the Bible Half-Hours at the annual sessions of New England Yearly Meeting, August 1–9, 2020. I offer my deep gratitude to those who served as my elders: from New England Yearly Meeting, Mary Hopkins and Jean Rosenburg; and from Sierra-Cascades Yearly Meeting of Friends, Dove John.
In our best moments, Friends have been in the middle of the action around the social justice issues of each time period, discerning to the best of their abilities the direction the Inward Light leads and speaking truth to power. In our own time, climate justice can no longer be ignored if we want to have a healthy planet to live on and if we want to participate in the heart of the justice movements of the twenty-first century.
To work on climate justice requires Quakers in the United States to revisit the practices and history of the Religious Society of Friends, recognizing the ways we have been complicit in unjust land acquisition, natural resource depletion, the intersecting injustices surrounding environmental racism, classism, and gender disparities, and the impacts of globalization. This book offers a series of meditations on the Quaker ecology, both internally in our denomination as well as in our connections to the world around us. It forms an invitation to participate in an Eco-Reformation, altering the trajectory of our Society through re-membering our history and reimagining our future as participants in the community of all life.
Cherice Bock is a recorded Quaker minister and a member of North Valley Friends in Oregon. She served as one of the founding co-clerks of Sierra-Cascades Yearly Meeting of Friends from 2017 to 2020. Bock holds a master of divinity degree from Princeton Theological Seminary and a master of science in environmental studies from Antioch University New England, and she is a Ph.D. candidate in the same field. She teaches at the college and seminary level in the areas of Bible, theology, and environmental justice, and she works as the creation justice advocate at Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon. She edits Barclay Press’s Friends Bible study curriculum, Illuminate.