The Lost Gospel of the Earth: A Call for Renewing Nature, Spirit and Politics

Amazon.com Review
Drawing upon the work of John Muir, Henry David Thoreau, St. Francis of Assisi, and even the Dalai Lama and Pope John Paul II, activist Tom Hayden writes that religion is the answer to today's environmental crisis. Though he berates many religions for perpetuating man's dominance of earth, he cites a growing awareness of the sanctity of all creation. He calls for the unification of increasing numbers of eco-spiritualists and a revamping of traditional religious doctrines--including the Ten Commandments--to include guidelines for taking care of the earth and to acknowledge the dependency of our own lives on its healthful existence.

From Publishers Weekly
In a beautifully argued and well-written book, California state senator Tom Hayden argues that that Christian pastors must rediscover what he calls the "lost Gospel of the Earth" and rouse their congregations to environmentalist political action. Unless they do so, he contends, our governing bodies will never face up to the environmental challenges wrought by burgeoning population and what he calls a "dominion theology." Hayden's book is a call to political action of the sort that marked the civil rights movement, a political action that began in the churches. This is a clearheaded manifesto from a savvy politician who understands what it will take to oppose what he believes to be a rip tide of right-wing millennialist theology that has reconstructed Christian tradition to justify continued plundering of the planet in the name of Christ. Hayden's timely book is a dramatically argued eco-spiritual manifesto designed to reanimate the ecological wisdom of Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism and Native traditions and bring it into the political sphere. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.