Since Lynn White's 1967 article on Christianity's insensitivity to and its culpability for environmental destruction, the Christian theological community has responded in a variety of ways to the ecological challenges of our times. In this paperback Steven Bede Scharper presents a scintillating and comprehensive overview of this important subject. The author, who teaches at the University of Notre Dame and is co-author with his wife Hilary Cunningham of The Green Bible, advocates a wedding of ecological activism with a social justice perspective.
Scharper does a fine job summarizing the Gaia theory of James Lovelock; the process ecological theology of John B. Cobb, Jr., Jay B. McDaniel, and Catherine Keller; the new cosmology of cultural historian Thomas Berry and mathematician cosmologist Brian Swimme; the ecofeminism of Rosemary Radford Reuther and Sallie McFague; and the liberation theology of Leonardo Boff which compares the oppression of the poor to the subjugation of the earth. Redeeming the Time challenges Christians to see themselves as caretakers of the Creation.