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

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

Tom Hayden. Sierra Club Books for Children, $22 (280pp) ISBN 978-0-87156-888-5

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. (Sept.)