Friday Nudge: Books on Living As If

Two books that explore how we might live as if we were already there

Welcome! I am Jessica Hetherington, and this newsletter is about faith and climate action. You can subscribe by clicking here:

Happy Friday! This is your first Friday Nudge. It is a shift from the previous Friday Notes; instead of providing you with a lot of ideas for action in one post, I have decided to offer you just one nudge of encouragement each week. The intent is to avoid the overwhelm that readers often feel in this time of climate crisis, especially toward the end of the week, and to offer you just one simple idea that links to faith-based climate action.

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Book Recommendations: Living As If

Author Debra Rienstra refers to two other texts in her book Refugia Faith: Seeking Hidden Shelters, Ordinary Wonders, and the Healing of the Earth (2022). Lisa Wells encounters people seeking to live as if humans were already living in accord with the Earth community. Todd Wynard is one of them, who has his book on how to live in the wildness of the Jesus Way.

Check them out:

Believers: Making a Life at the End of the World by Lisa Wells (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021)

Long passionate about and gripped by the reality of the climate crisis and its existential threat, author Lisa Wells reaches out to a diverse range of people who are seeking to live as if humans were in sync with the rest of the natural world. They are people who live on the margins; people who are on the fringes of the status quo and often disparaged for their uncompromising and radical ways of seeking to live in harmony with the Earth community. Wells seeks to learn from them what is wrong with the world, how to heal the world, and be healed by the world. The characters who grace the pages of this book are at turns compelling and challenging, for the author and for the reader. I invite you to read it and see where you find yourself. Learning from them, how might you live as if we were once again in harmony in the Earth community?

Rewilding the Way: Break Free to Follow an Untamed God by Todd Wynward (Harrisonburg, VA: 2015)

Author Todd Wynward is a wilderness expert and guide who uses the reality and metaphor of wilderness in both Scripture and real life to “rewild the Jesus Way.” He wants readers to become disentangled from affluenza and the other ills of modern society, and to escape from a 'tame’ Christianity, in order to become reoriented within the natural world and follow a God who was never meant to be tame in the first place. Wynward draws on the examples of others, as well as his own experience, to enlighten and encourage us on our paths so that we, too, might live as if we were restored to right relationships within the Earth community.

Have you read either book? Let me know what you think in the comments. In imagining a world in which human beings are living in harmony within the Earth community, how might you live as if we were already there?