THE GREEN FACE OF GOD:
CHRISTIANITY IN AN AGE OF ECOCIDE
by Mark I. Wallace
God the Spirit enfleshed in creation,
experiences the agony of an earth under siege. The Spirit as the green
face of God has become in our time the wounded God.
MARK I. WALLACE is
Associate Professor and Chair of Religion, Swarthmore College. He is
the author of Fragments of the Spirit: Nature, Violence, and the
Renewal of Creation and The Second Naiveté: Barth, Ricoeur,
and the New Yale Theology. He is also a member of the
Constructive Theology Workgroup, active in the environmental justice
movement in the Philadelphia area, and recently received an ACLS
Contemplative Practice Fellowship to redesign his course offerings
along eco-friendly lines.
At bedtime I sometimes read to my five-year-old daughter the Dr. Seuss
classic, The Lorax. The story takes place in a bucolic
setting of heavily fruited Truffula Trees, Swomee-Swans, and Brown
Bear Bar-ba-loots; it is a place where "from the rippulous pond[s] /
comes the comforting sounds / of the Humming-fish
humming / while splashing around." This arcadian scene is
invaded by the enterprising Once-ler who discovers that the soft tuft
of the Truffula Trees can be harvested to make clothes -- or Thneeds.
The Once-ler proceeds to chop down all of the Truffula Trees for
Thneeds. But because the Truffula Trees provide food and shelter for
the animals that live in this place the death of the trees marks the
end of all of the Swomee-Swans, Brown Bar-ba-loots, and Humming-fish
that depended on these trees for their survival. At this point the
destruction of the once beautiful countryside is interrupted by the
Lorax, a small walrus-like creature with a big yellow mustache, who
prophesies correctly that the Once-ler's rapacious abuse of his
immediate surroundings will result in total destruction of the
environment. True to the Lorax's prophecy, this sylvan landscape
becomes saturated in toxins: the air is filled with "smogulous
smoke" and local waters degenerate into "Schloppity Schlopp. . .
that is glumping the pond where the Humming-Fish hummed! / No
more can they hum, for their gills are all gummed." The Once-ler
bemoans, "No more trees. No more thneeds. No more work to be
done. / So, in no time, my uncles and aunts, every one, /
all waved me goodbye. They jumped into my cars / and drove away
under the smoke-smuggered stars. / Now all that was left 'neath
the bad-smelling sky / was my big empty factory / the Lorax /
and I." In the wake of this ecocide, the Lorax himself departs
from this now ugly world and leaves in his absence a pile of rocks
with the word "unless" inscribed in the rubble. In the final
pages of the story a young child happens onto this rock pile and is
greeted by the Once-ler, who is depressed and alone and living in the
boarded-up remains of his once proud capitalist empire. The Once-ler
says to the child, "But now, now that you're here, / the
word of the Lorax seems perfectly clear, / UNLESS someone like
you / cares a whole awful lot, / nothing is going to get
better. / It's not."
This story is charged with the simple but profound message that all
forms of life need and depend upon one another for their health and
survival and that the gradual destruction of one lifeform (in this
case, the bountiful Truffula Trees) eventually results, in a
ripple-like effect, in the degradation of the whole ecosystem that
originally supported the lifeform now under siege. The Lorax
is a whimsical but telling children's story about the biological
interdependence that binds all members of the life-web to one another.
Sadly, it is a story that ends on the plaintive note that unless
someone decides to care for the integrity of the life-web, the
destruction of the places that we dearly love is a forgone conclusion
-- whether these places are the Truffula lands of Seuss's fertile
imagination or the places we call home where we live and work and
raise our families.
Why is the biosphere which we daily rely upon for sustenance and
refreshment in such deep trouble? And how might a reinterpretation of
the Christian tradition help to resolve this crisis? Let me first
sound the depths of the origins of this crisis in the spiritual torpor
of our age and then move to an ecological retrieval of the Holy Spirit
as the linchpin for forging a green theology responsive to the
environmental crisis in our time.
The Earth Crisis is a Spiritual Crisis
We face an environmental crisis today of staggering proportions.(1)
We now know this. But we seem confused as to how to address the crisis
in a manner that will engender long-term sustainable growth and
development for human communities without sacrificing the
vital needs of nonhuman communities to survive and flourish. All of us
-- liberal and conservative, religious and nonreligious, third world
and first world, rich and poor -- claim to want a balance between
satisfying essential human needs and preserving the biodiversity that
makes our planet a rich and invigorating place in which to live. Yet
we apparently lack the heartfelt commitment to sustainability required
for insuring the integrity of humankind and otherkind in unity with
one another.
But why is this? Is the cause of our collective inability to
address adequately the earth crisis a cognitive failure to understand
what it will take to build sustainable communities? Is the problem, in
other words, essentially technological, so that if we only had, for
example, better pollution controls to protect against the greenhouse
effect we might stem the deleterious impact of global warming on
public health, for humankind and otherkind? Or is the real reason
behind our failure to practice earth-healing a matter of the heart?
That is, do we not know how to solve the problem or do we not
care enough about interspecies integrity to feel motivated to
address the predicament at hand? I believe that the fundamental cause
of our collective inability to confront the global environmental
crisis is our deep-seated unwillingness to change our habits and
embrace greener lifestyles. The problem is a matter of the heart, not
the head. The problem is not that we do not know how to avoid our
current plight but rather that we no longer experience our
co-belonging with nature in such a way that we are willing to alter
our lifestyles in order to build a more sustainable future. Of course,
both on the level of technological innovation and public policy, there
is much we can do to stem the tide of environmental degradation. But
unless at the core of our deepest selves we are fundamentally
committed to sustainable living no amount of eco-efficiency in
business and industry will make for long-lasting change.
Moreover, insofar as the environmental crisis is a matter of the
heart the crisis at its core is a spiritual crisis. The environmental
crisis is a spiritual crisis because the continued
degradation of the earth threatens the fundamental goods and values
that bind human beings to one another and all other forms of life. At
a very deep level we no longer feel our common kinship with other
beings as the basis for earth-friendly action and commitment. We have
lost that primordial sense of belonging to a whole web of life that
our kind and otherkind need for daily sustenance.
But in saying that the earth crisis is a spiritual crisis I also
mean that the problem is explicitly a religious problem in the sense
that the promulgation of particular theological teachings has lead to
the ravaging of earth communities -- for example, the idea in the
Genesis creation story that God, a heavenly being far removed from our
planet, created human beings as God's viceregents to exercise
"dominion" over the earth. If God has given the earth to us
as our private possession, then why not do with it what we want to?
Lynn White, in a now famous essay, writes that Western Christianity's
attack on paganism effectively stripped the natural world of any
spiritual meaning by replacing the belief that the Sacred is in rivers
and trees with the doctrine that God is a disembodied Spirit whose
true residence is in heaven, not on earth.(2)
"By destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to
exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural
objects."(3) I believe
White is partially accurate in his analysis. The impact of
Christianity's antipagan teachings has tended to empty the biosphere
of any sense of God's presence in natural things. God is now pictured
as a sky-God with little if any connection to natural processes. In
turn, human beings, as bearers of God's image, are regarded
essentially as "souls" taking up temporary residence in
their earthly bodies: we are all transient denizens of a material
world from which we will be delivered in death in order to return to
the disembodied Source from which we have originated. Along the way,
these teachings imply or state outright that God is against nature,
with the result that they inculcate in human beings an absence of
family feeling for other biotic communities. In this sense, therefore,
the ecological crisis is fundamentally a spiritual crisis because
certain Christian teachings have blunted our ability to experience
co-belonging with other lifeforms, rendering us unwilling to alter our
self-destructive course and plot a new path toward sustainable living.
I have said that ecocide is a spiritual disease. Like alcoholism --
another disease, as Carl Jung said, that is essentially spiritual in
nature(4) -- ecocide is rooted
in addictive behaviors that already have and will continue to degrade
health and well being. The "spiritual" origins of ecocide
are apparent in our head-long rush to disaster; as in the case of the
alcoholic, we know we are destroying our lives but we can no longer
stop ourselves from doing so. Why else would the human community push
itself further and further toward certain environmental catastrophe --
global warming, irreversible ozone depletion, massive deforestation,
chronic loss of arable land, daily extinction of hundreds of species
-- unless it is addicted to toxic habits from which it can no longer
escape? But if the root of the environmental problem is deeply
spiritual or religious at its core, it is also the case, ironically,
that a partial answer to the problem lies in a rehabilitation of the
earth-friendly teachings within the spiritual traditions that seem
most hostile to nature, namely, the Christian tradition. If ecocide is
a disease of the soul then it requires spiritual medicine -- the
medicine of healthy, rather than toxic, Christian values and ideas.
This paradox should not be surprising to us. It is often the case that
the seeds for positive change lie deep within the very thing that is
the source of the seemingly incorrigible impediments to change in the
first place. Christianity, then, is the pharmakon of looming
environmental disaster: in part, it is both the cause of the problem
and its solution. It is both the origin of the ecocidal
"disease" from which we suffer and its "cure,"
insofar as it provides resources for a new green mindset toward nature
that is a prophylactic against antinature attitudes and habits.
If Christianity is both disease and cure vis-à-vis the ecocrisis,
then what role can the ancient earth wisdom within Christianity play
in making our respective bioregions vital places in which to live and
work? I believe that hope for a renewed earth is best founded on
belief in the Spirit as the divine force within the cosmos who
continually indwells and works to sustain all forms of life. The
Nicene Creed names the Spirit as "the Lord, the Giver of
Life." In this essay, I will try to update this ancient
appellation by reenvisioning the Holy Spirit as God's invigorating
presence within the society of all living beings.(5)
Unfortunately, however, many contemporary Christians experience and
understand the Spirit -- if they think about the Spirit at all -- as
the forgotten member of the Trinity, the shy member of the Godhead,
the left hand of God. In the lived practice of God's presence in many
non-charismatic Christian communities today, the promise of the Spirit
to fill and renew all God's creation is generally overlooked. This
oversight renders present-day Christianity a binary religion, a
religion of the Father and the Son, with little if any awareness of
the Spirit's critically important work in the world. To counteract
this tendency, I offer here an earth-centered model of the Spirit as
the "green face" of God who sustains the natural order and
unifies all God's creation into one common biotic family.
Theologically speaking, this earth-centered doctrine of the Spirit is
the best grounds for hope and renewal at a point in human history when
our rapacious appetites seemed destined to destroy the planet. A new
vision of the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of the earth has the potential
both to renew the church and invigorate policy discussions about how
best to protect the planet.
Finally, I believe that a recovery of the ancient idea of the
Spirit as God's presence within all things is directly applicable to
one of the most intractable ecological problems in our time: the
siting of dangerous toxic waste facilities in underresourced urban
areas. As a case study that applies the model of the Earth Spirit to a
contemporary ecological problem, I will offer a theological response
to the environmental degradation caused by the installation of a
cluster of waste facilities in the area where I live. In this context,
my basic point is that God agonizes over just such instances of
degradation and that through this divine agony we are offered the
resources for renewal and change. Insofar as the Earth Spirit lives
with us in and through the created world, then God as Spirit suffers
loss and pain whenever the biotic order is despoiled through human
arrogance. Because God as Spirit is enfleshed within creation, God
experiences within the core of her deepest self the agony and
suffering of an earth under siege.(6)
The Spirit, then, as the green face of God, has also become in our
time the wounded God. The Earth Spirit is the wounded God who
daily suffers the environmental violence wrought by humankind's
unremitting ecocidal attitudes and habits.
God is Green
In Western religious thought, however, the Spirit is defined as a
bodiless, nonmaterial reality, over and against the physical world,
which is not of the same nature as the Spirit. As one theological
dictionary puts it, the Spirit is "immaterial or nonmaterial
substance. . . The term spiritus can therefore be
applied to God generally, to the Third Person of the Trinity
specifically. . ."(7)
Western thought generally operates according to a series of binary
oppositions that separate spirit from body, mind from matter, and God
from nature. These dichotomies not only divide the spiritual from the
physical. They also hierarchically order the two terms in the polarity
and posit the first term (spirit, mind, God) as superior to the second
term (body, matter, nature). In general, therefore, Western thought
has not only pitted the spiritual world and the physical order against
one another but also subordinated the one to the other. In this
schema, the Spirit is regarded as an eternally invisible and
incorporeal force superior to the earthly realm which is mired in
contingency and change.
While some of the biblical writings appear partial to these binary
oppositions (for example, Paul's rhetoric of spirit versus flesh),
most of the biblical texts undermine this value system by structurally
interlocking the terms in the polarity within one another. In
particular, on the question of the Spirit, the system of polar
oppositions is consistently undermined. Not only do the scriptural
texts not prioritize the spiritual over the earthly. Moreover, they
figure the Spirit as a creaturely lifeform always already
interpenetrated by the material world. Indeed, the body of symbolism
that is arguably most central to the scriptural portraiture of the
Spirit is suffused with nature imagery. Consider the following tropes
for the Spirit within the Bible: the vivifying breath that
animates all living things (Gen. 1:2, Ps. 104:29-30), the healing
wind that brings power and salvation to those it indwells (Judges
6:34, John 3:6, Acts 2:1-4), the living water that quickens
and refreshes all who drink from its eternal springs (John 4:14,
7:37-38), the purgative fire that alternately judges
evildoers and ignites the prophetic mission of the early church (Acts
2:1-4, Matt. 3:11-12), and the divine dove, with an olive
branch in its mouth, that brings peace and renewal to a broken and
divided world (Gen. 8:11, Matt. 3:16, John 1:32). In these texts, the
Spirit is pictured as a wild and insurgent natural force who engenders
life and healing throughout the biotic order.(8)
Far from being ghostly and bodiless, the Spirit reveals herself in
the biblical literatures as an earthly lifeform who labors to
create, sustain, and renew humankind and otherkind in solidarity with
one another. As the divine wind in Genesis, the dove in the Gospels,
or the tongues of flame in Acts, an earth-based understanding of the
Spirit will not domesticate the Spirit by locating her activity simply
alongside nature; rather, nature itself in all its variety will be
construed as the primary mode of being for the Spirit's work in the
world. Now the earth's waters and winds and birds and fires will not
be regarded only as symbols of the Spirit but rather as
sharing in her very being as the Spirit is enfleshed and
embodied through natural organisms and processes.
There are inklings of nature-centered pneumatology within historic
Christianity. In Western theology, the work of the Holy Spirit has
always been understood in terms of communion, mutuality, and the
overcoming of divisions. The early Latin Fathers conceived of the
Spirit in the bosom of the Trinity as the divine power that unites the
Father and the Son in a bond of mutual love. Basil of Caesarea wrote
that the Holy Spirit is the agent of inseparable union within the
Trinity. The Spirit labors alongside the Creator and the Redeemer as
the Perfector who strengthens and completes the divine work of
salvation in the world.(9)
Similarly, Augustine analyzed the role of the Spirit in terms of the vinculum
caritatis or the vinculum Trinitatis, the communion that
binds the other two members of the Godhead together in dynamic unity.(10)
The Spirit enables the mutual indwelling of each divine person in the
other. Moreover, as the bond of peace and love universal, these early
texts imply (without stating as such outrightly) that the Spirit is
not only the power of relation between the other members of the
Trinity but also between God and the whole creation as well.
Later medieval iconographers make a similar point but in a
pictorial medium. The doctrine of the Spirit as the vinculum
caritatis is graphically set forth in the trinitarian miniatures
of the medieval Rothschild Canticles, in which the Spirit is
pictured as a giant encircling "dove" whose wings enfold the
Father and Son, and whose large talons and tail provide points of
intersection for all three figures. But in the Canticles, the
Spirit is represented less like the domesticated birds or pigeons of
traditional church art and more like the wild raptors of the mountain
wildernesses. The Spirit-Bird in the Canticles spins and
twirls the other two members of the Godhead into amorous and novel
combinations and permutations. As the Canticles progress,
each lifeform within the Trinity loses its separate identity in a blur
of erotic passion and movement and color. As the Trinity twists and
turns into surprising recombinations, the human Father and Son smile
and twirl and dance around the aviary Spirit, symbolizing the union of
each figure in the sacred bird -- as well as the union of all
lifeforms in a common biotic order.(11)
The Spirit-Bird of the Canticles insures the
interrelationship of each divine person in a ludic celebration of
perichoretic harmony.(12) As
the Spirit exists perichoretically within the Godhead to foster
communion between the divine persons, my proposal is that the Spirit
also performs the role of the vinculum caritatis within
nature in order to promote the well-being and fecundity of creation.
From the perspective of biocentric trinitarian theology, nature is
the enfleshment of God's sustaining love. As Trinity, God bodies forth
divine compassion for all lifeforms in the rhythms of the natural
order. The divine Trinity's boundless passion for the integrity of all
living things is revealed in God's preservation of the life-web that
is our common biological inheritance. God as Trinity is set forth in
the Father/Mother God's creation of the biosphere, the Son's
reconciliation of all beings to himself, and the Spirit's gift of life
to every member of the created order who relies on her beneficence for
daily sustenance. As creator, God is manifested in the ebb and flow of
the seasons whose plantings and harvests are a constant reminder of
earth's original blessings. As redeemer, God is revealed in the
complex interactions of organisms and the earth in mutual sustenance
-- an economy of interdependence best symbolized by Jesus' reconciling
work of the cross. And as sustainer, God shows Godself through
breathing the breath of life into all members of the life-web, a
living testimony to the Divine's compassion for all things.
God's presence in the living Christ through the Spirit's
maintenance of the ecosphere is the basis for the greening of
trinitarian theology. The then and there incarnation of God in Jesus
is recapitulated in the here and now embodiment of the Spirit in the
world which hearkens back to the originary Mother God's birthing of
order out of chaos. This trinitarian enfleshment of God in nature
represents a tripartite movement. The first move to an embodied
doctrine of God is signaled by the inaugural hymn of Genesis where the
Creator Spirit (rûah) breathes the world into existence and
thereby enfleshes itself in the creation and maintenance of the
natural order. The embodiment of the divine life in Jesus is the
second move toward a nature-centered model of the Godhead. And the
perichoretic union of Jesus in the Spirit -- like Jesus, an earth
being as well but now figured in the biblical tropes of water, dove,
fire, and wind -- represents the third move toward a biophilic notion
of God. It is the move to embodiment -- the procession of Godself into
the biotic realm that sustains all life -- that is the basis for unity
within the Godhead. In perichoresis, God as Trinity subsists in
interpersonal unity through incarnating itself in all things that
swim, creep, crawl, run, fly, and grow upon the earth.
The understanding of the Spirit as a lifeform intrinsically related
to nature emphasizes a generally neglected model of the Spirit in the
history of Western theology. In theory, the Spirit has always been
defined as both the Spirit of God and the Spirit of
creation. As the Spirit of God, the Spirit is the power of
reciprocity between the first two persons of the Trinity, on the one
hand, and the interior power of redemption within human beings, on the
other. And as the Spirit of creation, the Spirit has been defined as
the breath of God who indwells and sustains the cosmos. In practice,
however, the Spirit has been almost exclusively understood as the
Spirit of God; the stress has fallen on its roles as the source of
consubstantiality within the Godhead and the divine agent of human
salvation. The result is that the biocentric role of the Spirit as the
power of life-giving breath within creation, including nonhuman as
well as human creation, has been consistently downplayed.(13)
Water, light, dove, mother, fire, breath, wind -- the Spirit
reveals herself as a healing and subversive lifeform. These
nature-based descriptions of the Spirit are the basis of my attempt to
shift the theological focus back to the Spirit as the Spirit of
creation. Such a focus neither denigrates nor ignores the regnant
understanding of the Spirit's other roles as the power of relationship
between the Father and Son or as the agent of human sanctification
within the history of salvation. Rather, this emphasis on the Spirit's
cosmic identity as the divine breath who interanimates all other
lifeforms readdresses our attention to the Spirit's work in all
realms of life -- which includes, but is not limited to, the inner
life of God and salvation-history. Part of the burden of this essay,
then, is to shift the weight of theological emphasis away from
understanding the Spirit either theocentrically or anthropocentrically
toward an explicitly biocentric model of the Spirit in
nature.
The Wounded Spirit
To reconceive the Spirit as the enfleshment of God's sustaining
power in the biosphere is to emphasize the coinherence of the Spirit
and the natural world. Whether manifesting herself as a living,
breathing organism like a dove, or an inanimate lifeform, such as wind
or fire, the Spirit indwells nature as its interanimating force in
order to lead all creation into a peaceable relationship with itself.
Spirit and earth internally condition and permeate one another; both
modes of being coinhere through and with one another without
collapsing into undifferentiated sameness or equivalence. The
reciprocal indwelling of Spirit and earth is neither an absorption of
the one into the other nor a confusion of the two. By the same token,
this mutual indwelling is not an outward and transitory connection
between the two realities but rather an internal and abiding union of
the two in a common life together. Insofar as the Spirit abides in and
with all living things, Spirit and earth are inseparable and
yet at the same time distinguishable. Spirit and earth are
internally indivisible because both modes of being are living
realities with the common goal of sustaining other lifeforms. But
Spirit and earth also possess their own distinctive identities insofar
as the Spirit is the unseen power who vivifies and sustains all living
things while the earth is the visible agent of the life that pulsates
throughout creation.
Under the control of this dialectic, the earth is the body of the
Spirit. Metaphorically speaking, God as Spirit corporealizes Godself
through her interanimation of the biosphere. In breathing life into
humankind and otherkind, a fundamental transformation within Godself
occurs: God is fully incarnated in the green fuse that drives all
forms of life to their natural fruition in a carnival of praise to the
Creator Spirit. As once God became human in the body of Jesus so
continually God enfleshes Godself in the embodied reality of life on
earth. Quintessentially, then, both Spirit and earth are life-givers:
the Spirit ensouls the earth with the quickening breath of
divine life and the earth enfleshes the Spirit as it offers
spiritual and physical sustenance to all living things. The Spirit
inhabits the earth as its invisible and life-giving breath (rûah),
and the earth (gaia) is the outward manifestation, the body,
as it were, of the Spirit's presence within, and maintenance of, all
lifeforms.(14)
This proposal for an ecological pneumatology of internal
relatedness presents an extraordinary challenge to the traditional
Aristotelian and early Christian doctrine of God as an unchangeable
and self-subsistent being fundamentally unaffected by the creation God
has spun into existence. One intriguing but troubling implication of
ecological pneumatology, therefore, is that it places the divine life
at risk in a manner that an extrinsic doctrine of the Spirit vis-à-vis
the earth does not. The theological problem is that if Spirit and
earth mutually indwell one another then it appears that God as Spirit
is vulnerable to serious loss and trauma just insofar as the earth is
abused and despoiled. In an earth-centered model of the Spirit,
God is a thoroughgoing incarnational reality who decides in freedom,
and not by any internal necessity, to indwell all things. But in
making this decision, the Spirit places herself at risk by virtue of
her coinherence with a continually degraded biosphere. God, then, is
so internally related to the universe that the specter of ecocide
raises the risk of deicide: to wreak environmental havoc on the earth
is to run the risk that we will do irreparable harm to the Love and
Mystery we call God. The wager of this model is that while God and
world are not identical to one another, their basic unity and common
destiny raises the possibility that ongoing assaults against the
earth's biotic communities may eventually result in permanent injury
to the divine life itself.
Moltmann's The Crucified God (and the wealth of similar
books it spawned on the topic of divine suffering) argues that God in
Jesus suffers the godforsaken death of the cross.(15)
In antitheopaschite terms, the cross does not signify the "death
of God" but rather the death of Jesus as a terrifying event of
loss and suffering within the inner life of Godself. The cross is not
an instance of God dying but an event in Godself where the divine life
takes into itself the death of the godless son of God crucified for
the sins of the world. In the cross, God now becomes radically
discontinuous with Godself by taking up the crucified one.
[W]hat happened on
the cross was an event between God and God. It was a deep division in
God himself, insofar as God abandoned God and contradicted himself,
and at the same time a unity in God, insofar as God was at one with
God and corresponded to himself. In that case one would have to put
the formula in a paradoxical way: God died the death of the godless on
the cross and yet did not die. God is dead and yet is not dead.(16)
In the cross, God splits Godself by incorporating the godless death
of Jesus into the inner life of the Godhead. In this rift caused by
Jesus' death, God now undergoes a permanent and fundamental change by
becoming a willing victim of death itself.
As Jesus' death on the cross brought death and loss into Godself so
the Spirit's suffering from persistent environmental trauma engenders
chronic agony in the Godhead. From the perspective of ecological
pneumatology, Moltmann's "crucified God" has a double
valence: death enters the inner life of God through the cross of Jesus
even as the prospect of ecological mass death enters the life of God
through the Spirit's communion with a despoiled planet. We see, then,
that the Spirit is Christ-like or cruciform because she suffers the
same violent fate as did Jesus -- but now a suffering not confined to
the onetime event of the cross insofar as the Spirit experiences daily
the continual degradation of the earth and its inhabitants. Because
this trauma deeply grieves the Spirit, she pleads with God's people to
nurture and protect the fragile bioregions we all share. Paul writes
that human arrogance causes the whole creation to groan in agony as it
waits for deliverance; he continues that as the creation sighs in pain
the Spirit on our behalf likewise groans in sounds too deep for words
-- interceding on our behalf that God's love for all creation will be
consummated (Romans 8:18-39). In the midst of the current crisis, the
created order groans under the weight of humankind's habitual
ecoviolence; in turn, the Spirit intensely beseeches us to care for
our planetary heritage. God as Spirit agonizes over the squalor we
have caused and through her abiding earthly presence implores us to
stop the violence before it is too late.
From this viewpoint, as the God who knows death through the cross
of Jesus is the crucified God, so also is the Spirit who enfleshes
divine presence in nature the wounded Spirit. Jesus' body was
inscribed with the marks of human sin even as God's enfleshed presence
-- the earth body of the Spirit -- is lacerated by continued assaults
upon our planet home. Consider the sad parallels between the crucified
Jesus and the cruciform Spirit: the lash marks of human sin cut into
the body of the crucified God are now even more graphically displayed
across the expanse of the whole planet as the body of the wounded
Spirit bears the incisions of further abuse. God is the wounded Spirit
even as God is the crucified Christ -- as God suffered on a tree by
taking onto Godself humankind's sin, so God continually suffers the
agony of death and loss by bringing into Godself the environmental
squalor that humankind has wrought.
The Spirit in the Killing Fields of Urban America
In an ecocidal age, I have proposed that we reenvision the Spirit
as the cruciform Spirit who bears in herself the deep wounds caused by
our sins against the earth community. Could it be, then, that an
adequate basis for hope in a restored earth lies in a recovery of the
Holy Spirit as God's power of life-giving breath (rûah) who
indwells and sustains all lifeforms? Perhaps. But a Spirit-centered
and earth-centered basis for such a theological hope is difficult to
sustain on a planet scarred by savage violence. Such hope is difficult
to sustain when one's bioregion is under daily assault by ravenous
forces that labor to destroy hope through the politics of despair.
Such is the case in the bioregion where I live, in close proximity to
the city of Chester, Pennsylvania, nearby my home and the college
where I teach.
I remember well my first visit to the west end of the city of
Chester a couple of years ago. Chester, a postindustrial city just
outside Philadelphia, was known by me at the time as notorious for its
chronic environmental problems, and I had traveled there to see first
hand the nature of its difficulties. The first thing I noticed upon
arriving in Chester was the smell: waves of noxious fumes enveloped me
like the stench of rotting meat. Next I felt the bone-jarring rumble
of giant eighteen-wheel trash trucks, dozens of trucks from all over
the mid-Atlantic and eastern seaboard, bearing down on the residential
streets on which I was walking with tons of trash -- trash which I
knew contained everything from toxic chemicals and contaminated soil
to sewage sludge and body parts. Then I remember looking to the
horizon and seeing the destination of these terrible truck convoys: a
line of giant chemical and waste processing plants belching putrid
smoke -- like Blake's dark Satanic Mills -- tightly interspersed among
the homes and churches and businesses of Chester residents. I was then
and remain now overwhelmed by the bald injustice of siting these
plants in a residential area. Since the time of this visit I have
asked myself what is the role of an earth-centered faith in the Spirit
-- in short, what is the role of green spirituality -- in resisting
and combatting the injustice done to the people, and the wider
biosphere, of Chester.
Many local economies in urban and rural America today are dependent
upon the production and management of toxic wastes. In economically
distressed communities the promise of a stabilized tax base, improved
infrastructure, and jobs for underemployed residents is almost
impossible to resist. The waste management industry offers an
immediate quick-fix to chronic poverty and instability in declining
cities and neighborhoods that can no longer attract government and
private investment. The price for allowing the storage and treatment
of biohazardous materials in one's community may be long-term
environmental problems. But people in the grip of poverty and
joblessness have few options when their very survival, materially
speaking, is contingent upon the construction of a trash incinerator
or chemical dump in their neighborhood.
Corporate investors know a good thing when they see it. Waste
management facilities cannot be sited where politically empowered
middle- and upper-class residents will fight through the courts the
establishment of such facilities. Close proximity to hazardous
industries immediately depresses property values in residential areas
where virtually no one wants to risk endangering his or her physical
and economic well being by allowing such a liability to be built in
their own backyard. And in those rare instances where such facilities
have come on line in high-income areas the residents have the means
and mobility to " 'vote with their feet' and move away from a
high risk place of residence."(17)
Chester is an impoverished, predominantly African-American
community in an almost all-white suburb, Delaware County. Its median
family income is 45 percent lower than the rest of Delaware County;
its poverty rate is 25 percent, more than three times the rate in the
rest of Delaware County; and its unemployment rate is 30 percent.
Chester has the highest infant mortality rate and the highest
percentage of low-weight births in the state.(18)
In the light of its alarmingly bad public health, Chester would appear
to be the last place to build a constellation of hazardous facilities.
Nevertheless, three waste and treatment plants recently have been
built on a square-mile site surrounded by homes and parks in a
low-income neighborhood in Chester. The facilities include the
American Ref-Fuel trash-to-steam incinerator, the Delcora
sewage-treatment plant, and the Thermal Pure Systems medical-waste
autoclave. A fourth waste processing plant devoted to treating PCB
contaminated soil has recently received a construction permit. The
clustering of waste industries only a few yards from a large
residential area has made worse the high rate of asthma and other
respiratory and health problems in Chester; it has brought about an
infestation of rodents, the impact of five hundred trucks a day at all
hours into the neighborhood, soot and dust covering even the insides
of people's homes, and waves of noxious odors that have made life
unbearable.(19) In a landmark
health study of the environmental degradation of Chester, the EPA
found that lead poisoning is a significant health problem for the
majority of Chester children; that toxic air emissions have raised the
specter of cancer to two-and-a-half times greater than the average
risk for area residents; and that the fish in Chester waters are
hopelessly contaminated with PCBs from current and previous industrial
abuses.(20)
The EPA study has made public what many Chester residents have long
known: the unequal dumping of municipal wastes in Chester has
permanently undermined the health and well being of its population.
Chester is a stunning example of environmental racism. 100 percent of
all municipal solid waste in Delaware County is burned at the
incinerator; 90 percent of all sewage is treated at the Delcora plant;
and close to a hundred tons of hospital waste per day from a
half-dozen nearby states is sterilized at the Thermal Pure plant.(21)
As Jerome Balter, a Philadelphia environmental lawyer puts it,
"When Delaware County passes an act that says all of the waste
has to come to the city of Chester, that is environmental
racism."(22) Or as Peter
Kostmayer, former congressman and head of the EPA's midatlantic
region, says: high levels of pollution in Chester would "not have
happened if this were Bryn Mawr, Haverford or Swarthmore [nearby
well-to-do white suburbs]. I think we have to face the fact that the
reason this happened is because this city is largely -- though not all
-- African American, and a large number of its residents are people of
low income."(23) Chester
has become a "local sacrifice zone" where the
disproportionate pollution from its waste-industrial complex is
tolerated because of the promise of economic revitalization.(24)
But the promise of dozens of jobs and major funds for the immediate
areas around the existing toxics industries have never materialized.
Indeed, of the $20 million the incinerator pays to local governments
in taxes only $2 million goes to Chester while $18 million goes to
Delaware County.(25)
Chester is Delaware County's sacrifice zone. The surrounding
middle-class, white neighborhoods would never allow for the systematic
over-exposure of their citizens to such a toxics complex. The health
and economic impact of siting even one of the facilities now housed in
Chester would likely be regarded as too high a risk. But to build a
whole cluster of such complexes in nearby Chester is another matter.
Nevertheless, many in Chester have tried to fight back against this
exercise in environmental apartheid. The Chester Residents Concerned
for Quality Living, led by community activist (or as she prefers,
"reactivist") Zulene Mayfield, has used nonviolent
resistance tactics -- mass protests, monitoring of emissions levels,
protracted court actions, and so forth -- to block the expansion of
the complex. In opposition to the granting of a permit for operation
for the fourth waste facility to be built in the area, the Soil
Remediation plant, the former mayor of Chester, Barbara Bohannan-Sheppard,
concluded her remarks at a public hearing with the following:
Chester should not
and will not serve as a dumping ground. A dumping ground for what no
other borough, no other township, or no other city will accept. Yes,
Chester needs the taxes, Chester needs the jobs. But, Chester also
needs to improve its image and not be a killing field.(26)
Hope is not lost in Chester. There is a growing awareness of the
injustice being done to low-income, often minority communities that
have suffered from the unequal distribution of environmental hazards
in their neighborhoods. Bill Clinton has signed an executive order
mandating all federal agencies to ensure the equitable location of
polluting industries across race and economic lines.(27)
And recently the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia ruled
that the Chester Residents organization has the legal right to file a
class action lawsuit against the Department of Environmental
Protection charging that the DEP violated their civil rights by
clustering a series of waste-processing facilities in their
neighborhood.(28)
What role if any can green spirituality play in the struggle
against environmental racism in areas such as Chester, Pennsylvania?
What is the place of the wounded Spirit, the green face of God, in the
struggle for environmental equity in neighborhoods that bear a
disproportionate and unfair burden for society's pollution? In
response, it should first be noted that few people see it in their
interests to express solidarity with disadvantaged communities that
have suffered the brunt of unequal distribution of environmental
risks. Many people have become inured to the gradual environmental
degradation of their home and work environments and most likely
consider the development of occasional toxic "sacrifice
zones" and "killing fields" to be a tragic but
necessary result of modern technological life and its attendant
creature comforts. If everyone has the right to pursue his or her own
material self-interests, and if some persons are better able to do
this than others due in part to their family or national origin,
socio-economic class, and so forth, then it follows that some
disadvantaged groups will be marginalized in the human struggle for
increased wealth, security, and power.
A spirituality centered on the wounded Spirit challenges this
self-centered assumption by affirming instead that all persons are
fundamentally equal and that everyone has the right to family
stability and meaningful work in a healthy environment regardless of
one's racial, cultural, economic, or sexual identity. Green
spirituality affirms the common interdependence of all persons with
each other -- indeed, of all species with each other -- as we all
struggle to protect the integrity of the life-web that holds together
our planet home. (29)
Insofar as the Spirit breathes into and sustains life for all members
of the web, green religion testifies to the bond of unity that unites
all God's children together on a sacred earth. As the participants of
the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit put
it: "Environmental justice affirms the sacredness of Mother
Earth, ecological unity and the interdependence of all species, and
the right to be free from ecological destruction."(30)
Thus earth-centered religion values the interconnections between all
members of the biosphere in contradistinction to the egoistic ideal of
maximizing self-interest.
Conclusion
I have suggested that we refer to the Spirit in our time as the
"wounded Spirit" or "cruciform Spirit" who, like
Christ, takes into herself the burden of human sin and the deep
ecological damage this sin has wrought in the biosphere. But as
Christ's wounds become the Eucharistic blood that nourishes the
believer, so also does the Spirit's agony over damage to the earth
become a source of hope for communities facing seemingly hopeless
environmental destitution. The message of the cross is that senseless
death is not foreign to God because it is through the cross that God
lives in solidarity with all who suffer. The promise of new life that
flows from the suffering God hanging from a tree is recapitulated in
the ministry of the wounded Spirit whose solidarity with a broken
world is a token of divine forbearance and love. Hope, then, for a
restored earth in our time is theologically rooted in the belief in
the Spirit's benevolent cohabitation with all of the damaged and
forgotten members of the biosphere -- human and nonhuman alike. The
Spirit's abiding presence in a world wracked by human greed is a
constant reminder that God desires the welfare of all members of the
life-web -- indeed, that no population of lifeforms is beyond the ken
of divine love, no matter how serious, even permanent, the ecological
damage is to these biotic communities.
One of the many ironies of Christian faith is the belief that out
of death comes life, from loss and suffering comes the possibility of
hope and renewal. This irony is symbolized in the Creator's emptying
of herself in creation so that all beings may enjoy fullness of life;
in Jesus' crucifixion where the spilling of his life blood becomes the
opportunity for all persons to experience the fullness of new life in
him; and in the Spirit's kenotic coinherence with the earth and
concomitant willingness to endure our ecological violence so that we
can be offered again and again the chance to change our habits and
reenter the sorority of the earth and her Creator. Our rapacious
habits daily wound afresh the Earth Spirit who breathes life into all
things; and daily the Earth Spirit intercedes for us and protects us
by allowing us to remain richly alive in spite of our behavior to the
contrary. The Spirit in and through the body of the earth groans in
travail over our addictions to ecoviolence. But in her wounds we have
life because it is in the wounded Spirit that we see God's love
overabundant and outpouring on our behalf. In her wounds we see God's
refusal to remain aloof from creation -- apathetic, unmoved, uncaring
-- just insofar as God decided to enflesh herself in all of the
processes and lifeforms that constitute life as we know it. We
continue unabated in our ravaging of the earth body of the one who has
given herself for us so that we might live. But to this point the
cruciform Spirit has not withdrawn her sustaining presence from the
planet -- a reminder to us that God is a lover of all things bodily
and earthly -- and a call to a renewed passion on our part for
nurturing and protecting the biosphere that is our common inheritance
and common home.
Can a recovery of the ancient, biblical idea of the Spirit as the
Green Face of God provide the necessary focus for the practice of
earth-healing in our time? The answer to this question has been the
focus of this paper. In this essay, I have proposed that one of the
most compelling Christian responses to the threat of ecocide
lies in a recovery of the Holy Spirit as God's power of life-giving
breath (rûah) who indwells and sustains all lifeforms. I
have said that the answer to the increasing environmental degradation
in our time is not better technology -- a matter of more know-how --
but a Spirit-motivated conversion of our whole ways of life to
sustainable living -- a matter of the heart. Such a change of heart
can occur through an encounter with Christian earth wisdom. This
wisdom for our troubled times can be found in the rich biblical
imagery of God as Spirit who sustains and renews all forms of life on
the planet; the corresponding belief, since the Spirit vivifies all
things, in the interdependence that binds together all members of the
biosphere in a global web of life; and the concomitant ethical ideal
of working toward the healing of various biotic communities whenever
they suffer ecological degradation.
Today we need a conversion of the heart to an integrated planetary
vision of a green earth where all persons live in harmony with their
natural environments. May the Holy Spirit, as divine force for
sustenance and renewal in all things, come into our hearts and minds
and persuade us to work toward a seamless social-environmental ethic
of justice toward all God's creatures.
Notes
1. [Back to text] 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. [Back to text] Lynn
White, Jr., "The Historic Roots of Our Ecological
Crisis," Science ): 1203-7.
3. [Back to text]
Ibid., 1205.
4. [Back to text] On
Jung's position regarding the spiritual origin of alcoholism, see
Ernest Kurtz, "Twelve Step Programs," in Spirituality
and the Secular Quest, ed. Peter A. Van Ness (New York:
Crossroad, 1996), 277-302.
5. [Back to text] A
number of recent texts have initiated recoveries of discourse about
"spirit," "the Spirit" or "the
spiritual" in a variety of genres. 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), 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), 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).
6. [Back to text] 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 here 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 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.
7. [Back to text] 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.
8. [Back to text] For
more discussion of ecological pneumatology, see my Fragments of
the Spirit: Nature, Violence, and the Renewal of Creation (New
York: Continuum, 1996). Some of the material in this section of this
essay is borrowed from this book.
9. [Back to text]
Basil of Caesarea De Spiritu Sancto bk. 16.
10. [Back to text]
Augustine De Trinitate bk. 15.
11. [Back to text]
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.
12. [Back to text] 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.
13. [Back to text]
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.)
14. [Back to text]
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
lifeforms 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 ): 13-28.
15. [Back to text]
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).
16. [Back to text] Jürgen
Moltmann, The Crucified God, trans. R. A. Wilson and
John Bowden (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 244.
17. [Back to text]
Bob Edwards, "With Liberty and Environmental Justice For All: The
Emergence and Challenge of Grassroots Environmentalism in the United
States," in Ecological Resistance Movements: The Global
Emergence of Radical and Popular Environmentalism, ed. Bron
Raymond Taylor (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), 37. On the challenge of
urban environmentalism also see Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the
Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement
(Washington: Island Press, 1993), and Carolyn Merchant, Radical
Ecology: The Search for a Livable World (New York: Routledge,
1992).
18. [Back to text] I
have drawn this information from "Chester Decides It's Tired of
Being a Wasteland," Philadelphia Inquirer, July 26,
1994; and Chester Residents Concerned for Quality Living,
"Environmental Justice Fact Sheet" and "Pollution and
Industry in Chester's 'West End,' " pamphlets. I am grateful to
former Swarthmore College students Laird Hedlund and Ryan Peterson for
making available to me their expertise and research concerning the
Chester waste facilities.
19. [Back to text]
Maryanne Voller, "Everyone Has Got to Breathe," Audubon,
March-April 1995.
20. [Back to text]
Editorial, "Chester a Proving Ground," Delaware County
Daily Times, December 8, 1994, and "EPA Cites Lead in
City Kids, Bad Fish," Delaware County Daily Times, 2
December 1994.
21. [Back to text]
Maryanne Voller, "Everyone Has Got to Breathe," Audubon,
March-April 1995, and Chester Residents Concerned for Quality Living,
"Environmental Justice Fact Sheet," pamphlet.
22. [Back to text]
"Chester's Environmental Crisis," Delaware County Times,
August 1, 995.
23. [Back to text]
Howard Goodman, "Politically Incorrect," The
Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine, February 11, 1996.
24. [Back to text]
The phrase belongs to Carolyn Merchant, Radical Ecology, 163.
25. [Back to text]
Chester Residents Concerned for Quality Living, "Pollution and
Industry in Chester's 'West End," pamphlet.
26. [Back to text]
Barbara Bohannan-Sheppard, "Remarks" (Department of
Environmental Resources Public Hearing, February 17, 1994,
transcript).
27. [Back to text]
Bill Clinton, Executive Order Number 12898, February 1995; cf.
Gretchen Leslie and Colleen Casper, "Environmental Equity: An
Issue for the 90s?" Environmental Insight, 1995.
28. [Back to text]
"Minority Areas Gain in Suit on Waste Sites," Philadelphia
Inquirer, January 1, 998.
29. [Back to text]
For further development on this point see my "Environmental
Justice, Neopreservationism, and Sustainable Spirituality," in The
Ecological Community: Environmental Challenges for Philosophy,
Politics, and Morality, ed. Roger S. Gottlieb (New York:
Routledge, 1997), 292-310.
30. [Back to text]
The First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit,
"Principles of Environmental Justice," in This Sacred
Earth: Religion, Nature, Environment, ed. Roger S. Gottlieb
(New York: Routledge, 1996), 634.
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