Resources for Lent 2020

by Sarah Withrow King

The season of Lent was not a strong part of my Christian formation. To me it was, at most, a time to stop eating some food I liked, to be “spiritual.” In high school, following the lead of a cute camp counsellor, I gave up meat for Lent…a commitment I abandoned after approximately two days when I ordered a turkey sandwich because I forgot that I had become a vegetarian.

It wasn’t until I became a parent, and I started looking for ways to help expand my son’s sense of Christian community, that I started paying closer attention to the rhythms of the Church calendar, and to Lent.

Whether you are a Lenten new-comer, like me, or have been marking this period for as long as you can remember, we hope these resources connecting Christian faith with animals will be a welcome addition to your Lent practice.

Wild Hope: Stories for Lent from the Vanishing

“Attention to the amazingness of our arkmates routes us directly to the heart of Lent. The season means to rouse us from our self-absorption. Absorbed instead in the beauty of other creatures, we see how they value their lives, lives woven together across species in beautifully complex webs. The nine-ounce red knot flies from the southern tip of the world to meet the horseshoe crab at precisely the week she crawls from the waters of Delaware Bay to lay her eggs. Once alive to the exquisite web holding all creatures, we also see the holes slashed through it. By us. We’re enraptured by the animals’ beauty, and we’re horrified by the suffering we inflict on that beauty. With Saint Paul we can hear all creation groaning, including ourselves.” Gayle Boss, from the introduction to Wild Hope: Stories for Lent from the Vanishing.

With a reading for each day of Lent, and Easter Sunday, Wild Hope connects our human stories with the stories of individual animals in creation. A simultaneously beautiful, heart breaking, and hope-filled work. Wild Hope: Stories for Lent from the Vanishing. Text Copyright © 2020 Gayle Boss. Illustrations Copyright © 2020 David G. Klein. Available from Paraclete Press.

CreatureKind Small Group Study

 “I was really glad to be able to consider a lot of areas of scripture that I hadn't thought about before. I found learning about the environmental cost and the way animals are treated on these farms to be very persuasive, in combination of a better understanding of how Christians should think about caring for other creatures and the earth,” said one participant. Post-course surveys show that in addition to thinking differently about animals, participants commit to changing their daily dietary choices, as well.

You can lead a church or community discussion using CreatureKind's free course! Our six-week small group study:

• helps Christian communities think about what their faith means for animals, 

• is designed especially for small groups to use over a six-week period (like Lent), 

• provides a gentle introduction to animal welfare and the church,

• and guides communities to explore how to care for animals more faithfully. 

Through videos, short readings, and lots of dialogue, the CreatureKind Course for Churches encourages Christians to consider what we believe about God’s creatures and how we might move toward living out those beliefs as members of the body of Christ. We provide all the course materials, and a guide for leaders. You don't need to have any specialist knowledge, just the motivation to help people think and discuss together. Download the course today! 

Honorable Mention: We Are The Weather

“The chief threat to human life—the overlapping emergencies of ever-stronger superstorms and rising seas, more severe droughts and declining water supplies, increasingly large ocean dead zones, massive noxious-insect outbreaks, and the daily disappearance of forests and species—is, for most people, not a good story. When the planetary crisis matters to us at all, it has the quality of a war being fought over there. We are aware of the existential stakes and the urgency, but even when we know that a war for our survival is raging, we don’t feel immersed in it. That distance between awareness and feeling can make it very difficult for even thoughtful and politically engaged people—people who want to act—to act.” Jonathan Safran Foer. We Are the Weather

Safran Foer applies the art and science of storytelling to help deeply connect readers to the realities of the climate crisis. While the book doesn’t connect Christian faith with animals, Safran Foer explores spiritual themes familiar to Christians. This may be a good resource to use for a group open to spiritual seekers, as well as Christians. Written in five parts, the book can be studied on your own or in a group. We Are the Weather. Text Copyright © 2019 by Jonathan Safran Foer. Available from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Virtual Visit with David Clough

If you’d like a chance to meet and discuss Christianity and animal ethics with CreatureKind founder and co-director, Professor David Clough, please plan to join us on October 21 and 22, 2019, for the “David Clough Virtual Visit,” a series of interactive online sessions, hosted by Farm Forward.

You can sign up for this free event by filling out the form here! You can participate as an individual, or as a group. We hope to see you there!

Green Seminary Initiative and CreatureKind Announce Partnership

GSI director, abby mohaupt, and CreatureKind co-directors, Sarah Withrow King and David Clough, on the campus of Santa Clara University in San Jose, CA.

While environmental advocacy and animal advocacy groups have often been at odds with one another, Green Seminary Initiative and CreatureKind believe that a holistic, effective approach to creation care must include attentiveness to both the breadth of environmental issues and the particular concerns raised by industrial farming practices.

Green Seminary Initiative (GSI) fosters efforts by theological schools and seminaries to incorporate care for the earth into the identity and mission of the institution, such that it becomes a foundational part of the academic program and an integral part of the ethos of the whole institution. CreatureKind’s mission is to encourage Christians to recognize faith-based reasons for caring about the well-being of fellow animal creatures used for food, and to take practical action in response. Today the two organizations announced a formal partnership that allows CreatureKind to work with GSI schools to help them achieve GSI’s certification standards related to food policy and to encourage them to include concern and action for animals in other areas of community life.

As an organization committed to many faith traditions, GSI understands that food and eating are central to multiple religions, as well as to spiritual formation. The consumption of food is a human experience that crosses ethnic and geographic barriers, and many religious traditions see animals as sacred in some way. GSI is also committed to paying attention to the ways in which environmental justice interlocks with justice for the poor, workers, and other marginalized communities.

CreatureKind calls attention to the abyss that currently exists between what Christians believe about animals and how we treat them in industrialized food production. Concern for animal well-being is deeply rooted in our Christian faith, and there is a long history of Christian leadership in animal protection movements. But as industrialized systems of animal agriculture have developed over the last century, churches have remained mostly silent about our radically altered relationships with pigs, chickens, turkeys, fish, and cows (and with the people who work to produce our food), and the devastating consequences of animal factories on the broader environment. Scientist and policy analyst Václav Smil has estimated that from the year 1900 to the year 2000, the biomass of all domesticated animals increased from three and a half times to twenty four times the biomass of all wild land mammals. During that same period of time, the biomass of wild land mammals was halved. It’s no coincidence that these same hundred years saw the demise of the small family farm alongside the birth and global spread of factory farming, which is now the dominant means of producing animal products for human consumption.

As more and more land is consumed by animal agriculture, the wild animal population shrinks, and there are additional urgent problems caused by increased consumption of animals. In addition to Industrial farms and slaughterhouses cause widespread environmental damages and use a disproportionate share of earth’s resources, while subjecting animals to painful physical mutilations, miserable living conditions, and traumatic deaths. Workers within the industrial farming system endure long hours, frequent injuries, and unjust working conditions. The increased use of antibiotics has contributed to the rise of so-called “superbugs,” and the overconsumption of animal products has been linked to a host of human ailments. In the United States, the vast majority of animal products—meat, milk, and eggs—are now produced on these intensive farms, where it is impossible for creatures to flourish as their Creator intended and where both humans and animals pay a high price for the availability of cheap meat.

These factory farms and other unsustainable food management systems are odds with theological institutions committed to teaching and embodying environmental justice for workers, consumers, and animals alike. That’s why GSI requires schools in their certification program to offer vegetarian food choices at all meals and to include organic and/or local produce at all meals. Electives in the program include the 30% reduction of the amount of meat served over three years, vegan options, and cage-free eggs.

Worldwide, more than 70 billion fellow land creatures and up to 7 trillion sea animals are killed for food each year. The use of animals for food massively dominates all other human uses of animals, and yet farmed animals—the animals on our plates—are conspicuously absent from the vast majority of Christian conversations about stewardship, creation care, and the environment. The partnership between GSI and CreatureKind seeks to correct that oversight.  

CreatureKind will join GSI and other partners at the Southwest Symposium on Ecologically Informed Theological Education at Brite Divinity School on March 13-14. More information can be found here.

Incarnating a CreatureKind Church at the Summer Institute for Reconciliation

by Sarah Withrow King

"He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created...and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things..."

Last week, I had the distinct pleasure of teaming up with Christopher Carter, who is an Assistant Professor at the University of San Diego, a Faith in Food Fellow for Farm Forward, and a member of CreatureKind's North American Advisory Council and Christine Gutleben, Senior Director of Faith Outreach at the Humane Society of the United States to co-teach "Incarnating a CreatureKind Church" at Duke Divinity's Summer Institute for Reconciliation.

Seminar participants feeding sheep at Piedmont Farm Animal Refuge. Photo by Christopher Carter

During the four-day-long event, our afternoon seminar discovered new ways to think about Christianity and animals. Following the "Word Made Flesh" methodology from the book Reconciling All Things, we discussed ways in which Christianity is good news for all creation. We lamented the realities of factory farming, a broken system that hurts animals, humans, and the environment. We visited a farmed animal sanctuary, to meet individual rescued animals and to hear their stories. We were invited into the notion of adopting an anti-oppressive mindset. We told our own stories of hope, of people and organizations working to bring about reconciliation in creation, and we talked about how to sustain ourselves spiritually for the long haul. 

Our diverse group shared their tender and courageous hearts with us throughout the week, we were able to learn much from one another, and we got to meet these two loves:

Photo by Julia Johnson

We are exploring the possibility of turning this extraordinary seminar into a webinar, so that more people can experience the renewal and fellowship that was such a blessing to us. If you want to help make that happen, please give a donation to CreatureKind today. 

Sarah cradling Charleston the rooster, who loved to have his face massaged. He fell asleep in my arms! Photo by Blue.