"Earth creatureliness understands the interconnectedness of newness and impermanence. The potential emergence of wonderful, surprising new things is bound up with the reality of fleetingness. Biblical metaphors for transience and impermanence speak not only to the reality of finitude and mortality but also to renewal and newness. There is a grasslikeness to everything we wish would last forever." - Timothy Beal ; When Time Is Short (p. 73)
"They were often unable, however, to connect one struggle for reform with another; for example, white abolitionists largely ignored lynching and white feminists argued over suffrage for blacks. Those fighting for economic justice overlooked the devastating impact of 'progress' on the environment. Nonetheless, these movements shaped the society in enduring ways. They testify to the legacy of struggle, still incomplete, to dwell rightly in paradise here and now. Their commitments live on in the marrow of those today who love this world and who resist all the death-dealing forces in it." - Rita Nakashima Brock & Rev. Dr. Rebecca Parkera ; Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire, p. 378
"The rather inchoate but pervasive appeal to chosenness in the public rhetoric of the United States has within it an unexpressed but powerful element of white chosenness, so that the theme of “chosenness” can also be a place-holder for racism. There is no doubt that American chosenness derives especially from European antecedents, so that the “real Americans” who are chosen are those with European rootage. Much of the rhetoric of US chosenness is also marked by a hostility to “foreigners” (nonwhites) who, it is said, diminish chosenness, and by “Christian” rhetoric of “taking back our country” from the foreigners and restoring it to proper order and management. Much of the great triumphal language of the church easily imagined white missionaries carrying the gospel to benighted nonwhites." - Walter Brueggemann ; Choosing Against Chosen-ness, Tenacious Solidarity: Biblical Provocations on Race, Religion, Climate, and the Economy (p. 124-125)
"Amos was calling out and grieving ancient Israelite exceptionalism, but his words speak powerfully to other forms of exceptionalism more familiar to us. Woe! to those who are at ease in America, who feel secure in gated communities, who stretch out on their couches, eating lamb and veal, drinking fine wine … Woe! to those who are at ease in the world today, who feel secure in prosperous countries, lounging in big cars and jets, drinking pricey bottled waters … who put far away the day of calamity." - Timothy Beal ; When Time Is Short (p. 107)
"Willie Jennings reminds us that hope is not simply a feeling. Hope, he says, is a discipline that requires constant practice within the context of community. But there’s still more to it: “what I have also learned is that living the discipline of hope in this racial world, in this white supremacist-infested country called the United States of America, requires anger.”" - Timothy Beal ; When Time Is Short (p. 103)
"Earth creatureliness recognizes the inseparability of environmental justice and social justice. Social justice and human wellbeing are inextricably bound up with ecological and cosmological well-being. Human thriving, ecological thriving, and cosmic thriving resonate with and reflect one another. Likewise, human injustice can undo the entire ecological and cosmological integrity of creation. As we will see with the biblical prophets, social injustice, especially the systemic oppression of poor and marginalized persons by the ruling elite, can bring the whole world down with it. The sun goes dark, the chaos waters rise, and the land mourns in response to unjust human practices of exploitation and extraction." - Timothy Beal ; When Time Is Short (pp. 72-73)
"Earth creatureliness understands the interconnectedness of life and death. Life and death are intertwined. Life comes from death, depends on death, even feeds on it. The soil from which the human is formed is the soil to which it returns. The earth’s topsoil is a planetary compost fertilized by every plant and animal that has ever lived. New life comes from it and returns to it. Biblical tradition understands this reality as the lived truth of creation, which is always re-creation, new life from death." - Timothy Beal ; When Time Is Short (p. 72)