Did Jesus eat fish? Should we eat fish ourselves?

By: Sydney Caron

10:25 On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” 26 “What is written in the Law?” he replied. “How do you read it?” 27 He answered, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’[a]; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’[b]”28 “You have answered correctly,” Jesus replied. “Do this and you will live.”29 But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” - Luke 10:25-29

Fred Rogers was an American television personality. He hosted a tv show for families and children. The show was called, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. 

At the beginning of each episode, Mister Rogers would sing: “It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood, a beautiful day for a neighbor — would you be mine? Could you be mine?…” 

Mister Rogers always ended this little jingle with an invitation: “Oh please won’t you be my neighbor?” Then, seconds later, a greeting, “Hi Neighbor!” 

When Mister Rogers asked the question, “Won’t you be my neighbor?” he wasn’t offering the type of invitation that required a person’s acceptance or rejection. Instead, he was offering the type of invitation that only required recognition. 

Mister Rogers sought to recognize every character he interacted with in his show, the viewers at home, and those he encountered in public as his neighbor, and he invited each participant to do the same. 

In one very simple greeting, “Hi Neighbor!” said at the beginning of each episode, Mister Rogers honored and affirmed neighborly nature and interconnectedness. 

To recognize one another as neighbors. To love our neighbors. 

This is a very familiar concept, is it not? 

In Luke 10:25-29, we encounter Jewish law — to love our neighbors as ourselves. Yet, much like the expert of the law in the story, we often seek to justify ourselves, and even our inaction, by shrinking the definition of who counts as a neighbor. 

Who is your neighbor? 

Your definition might include your friends, the people who live in your neighborhood, those you shop beside at the grocery store, or the people walking past you on a sidewalk. It might be those in your faith community, or those you work with. Your neighbors might be the people who live in your city, your country, your continent.

Your definition of neighbor might include all people. 

But God’s definition includes the whole of Creation. 

From the beginning of Genesis through Revelation, Scripture reveals a complex, interconnected, interdependent relationship between the land, humans, and non-human animals. Animals, present throughout biblical history, have always thrived, survived, and died alongside humans. 

Our neighbors are not only those with whom we share human life, they are also the creatures we encounter and exist alongside. 

Slugs, bugs, cows, goats, chickens, pigs, elephants, birds, snakes, and turtles. Any creature you can name can be recognized as your neighbor. 

Including fish. 

Fish are not often considered neighbors. Instead, humans are likely to consider them as entertainment or perhaps a way to teach responsibility when they are used as a first pet. Fish may also be used for competition when one aims to catch the biggest and best in the sport of fishing. Most commonly, fish are a portion of the meals on our plates. Perhaps concerned humans could find it easier to reconsider buying a pet fish or fishing for sport, but what about eating fish? 

Did Jesus eat fish? Should we eat fish? 

I’m not sure if Jesus ate fish or not, but if he did would that give us permission to do the same? Our choices to consume fish cannot and should not be based on whether or not Jesus ate fish. 

Jesus’s choice was a choice made in a particular time and place. Our contexts are different. In the Global West, our methods of sourcing, catching, killing, and distributing fish vary greatly from ancient methods, and human dependence and reliance on fish for nutritional purposes has changed. For people who do not rely on Indigenous methods of livelihood, the most common forms of food practices are rooted in colonialism, white supremacy, and industrial capitalism. Fish that are used for the sake of mass consumption are violated, dominated, and exploited before being killed. The ecosystems suffer as well, causing a disastrous ripple through oceans and estuaries. Additionally, people who work for commercial fishing companies are subject to being overworked and underpaid. They experience hazardous working conditions that include exposure to chemicals, equipment failure, and unpredictable weather, which all result in a higher than average workplace accident and fatality rate. 

When one part of God’s Creation suffers, especially for the gross benefit of another, our neighborly relationships with one another become distorted.

We become unable to witness God at work in our neighbors’ lives. 

We become unable to view their lives as equal to our own. 

We become unable to see shared relationships. 

Shared relationships as created beings begin to take an oppressive, hierarchical, speciesist form rather than being oriented to love of God and love of neighbor. 

Distortion of relationship with fellows created beings immediately distorts the relationship with our Creator. Hearts become hard, souls become empty, strengths become weakness, and minds become ill. When we are unable to love our neighbors, we are unable to love God. 

Regardless, God loves us. Through God’s Spirit we are empowered to live out Jesus’s call to practice liberation and mercy. God repairs. God restores. God invites us to reimagine life in relationship with God’s Creation. 

How can we begin to repair our distorted view of neighborly relationships with God’s Creation? 

We can begin by recognizing that fish, and all of God’s creatures, live with us as neighbors, not for us as food. 

We can learn from and practice the belief that loving one’s neighbor, loving God, and loving nature are inseparable, a belief that is lived out by Indigenous communities across the globe. 

With the welfare of our neighbors in mind, we can examine local commercial fishing practices and challenge laws and legislation that distort neighborly relationships. 

Instead of deciding whether or not to eat fish based on Jesus’s choice, we can decide whether or not to eat fish guided by the desire to follow Jesus’s commandment: love (all) your neighbors as yourself. Even the non-human ones. 

We can celebrate and proclaim that God’s good news for all of Creation includes fish! Amen

Blessing of the Animals Reflection

By Megan Grigorian

Note: A version of this reflection was given at the CreatureKind Blessing of the Animals service on 6/7/22. You can see a recording of the whole event here, as well as the virtual program for the service here. 

I have spent nearly fifteen years working in animal advocacy and experiencing industrial animal agriculture from many sides and environments–from pig farms in Brazil to chicken farms in North Carolina. I’ve protested against the use of animals for entertainment, for experimentation, for food all around the US, and I’ve worked with colleagues in Thailand, Australia, and the UK on campaigns to take measures that would improve the lives of farmed animals within the systems [where] they currently are forced to live. The problems with industrial farming are nuanced due to different governments and cultures, but what remains the same is how the animals suffer in a system that uses their bodies as products, rather than as living beings with whom we, humans, share the Earth. 

Today, I try to walk a path toward justice and liberation for all, which always includes human and non-human animals that suffer in the man-made systems of white supremacy and capitalism. These systems that uphold the modern farming industry that we get our food from today. The chickens, pigs, cows, and fish–and the farm workers, the migrant workers, and the slaughterhouse employees who do back breaking work in hazardous conditions for little pay and no protection. This system does not work for the most vulnerable among us.  

From our scripture today that has been woven into each part of the service, read again in its entirety. 

Job 12: 7-10: 

“But ask the animals, and they will teach you,

    the birds of the air, and they will tell you;

8  ask the plants of the earth, and they will teach you,

    and the fish of the sea will declare to you.

9  Who among all these does not know

    that the hand of the Lord has done this?

10  In God’s hand is the life of every living thing

    and the breath of every human being.

I think about this scripture and how animals are used in so many of the stories we’ve heard today to illustrate how we as humans can be stewards of the Earth, advocates for our communities, and present to our surroundings. Even in our daily lives, we can observe all these animals, take in new information, adjust our behavior and widen our lens the more we learn. We take all this in so we can work side by side to build a more harmonious world than the systems of oppression that have been imposed on us. Those systems that have severely impacted our relationship with so many animals, with each other, and with ourselves. In reflecting, a few stories from my own path stick out to me. They illustrate how listening to animals, and to each other, can help us to walk toward that kin-dom of nourishment, of connection, of stability, and of peace. 

Land Animals

My first job in animal advocacy was working to stop the circus from using elephants in its performances. Elephants and all wild animals used in entertainment are denied most of their natural instincts and behaviors, and they are forced to live under the will of people who are using them to make a profit. I would travel from city to city across the United States to meet with newspapers in hopes that they would write an editorial encouraging people not to support an industry that glorifies animal abuse. 

I traveled with a former circus trainer to do this work, who dreamt since she was a child of joining the circus and working with animals. She had a soft heart and a gentle voice. She lasted 8 months within the industry before she was unable to emotionally sit with the reality of what it took to train a 12,000 pound animal to perform tricks, and what these animals' homes were like in box cars and cold cement arena basements. The trainer couldn’t live in that dissonance knowing how different life would be for an elephant in their natural habitat. I respected her story, and her calling to bring truth to the dream that she and other children had been told about the circus. 

In their natural habitat, elephants travel in matriarchal herds. They can live to be around 70 years old, and they have very tightly knit pods. They walk up to 30 miles a day. They love swimming in water. If you’ve ever seen a baby elephant enjoy a mud bath, you’ve seen the face of pure joy. 

When someone in their pod dies, they have very specific and special mourning rituals that last days. Along with humans, they are one of the few species to have meaningful traditions around death. All of this life, this tradition, is erased when we see an elephant purely through a human lens–when we look at them only as what value they can provide for us. I don’t need to see an elephant up close to respect their wisdom, to value this special life on the land. 

Sea Animals

Next I was introduced to the plight of an orca named Tilikum and spent years learning about the sea animals that in the US are kept in captivity for entertainment. Animals like dolphins, who swim up to 100 miles a day in the open ocean. Dolphins are incredibly interesting animals. Each pod of dolphins has its own language with each other, somewhat similar to the differing dialects and accents in our own human communities. This is how they communicate, and how they recognize and find their way when they are lost. Incredible.  

Orcas and dolphins, these smart marine animals, suffer such psychological damage in captivity, after years–sometimes decades–being denied their natural life. Forced to perform for scraps of food, and living in an artificial version of their reality, they sometimes snap and attack their trainers. And with that one action we remember their violence, their size, their danger. When in the wild, orcas don’t attack humans if they come into contact with them. That judgment of violent behavior that we as humans created is the opposite of harmonious living with each other and other animals. Training a wild animal to be used as we please, whether from the land, sea, or sky, and enjoying the result of their suffering, is not being a steward of this earth as we are called to be.

Farmed Animals

Chickens and pigs have a special place in my heart. One campaign I worked on heavily focused on getting farmed chickens more enrichment because their minds desire to be active. They want to be perching and exploring different levels and heights–they are birds after all. Yet human-designed systems keep them in cramped cages and barns. They want to build nests, yet their environment is often just dirt floors and spaces that are less than a 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper. Chickens enjoy games and activities that challenge their minds. 

Pigs are playful and maternal and have the same cognitive understanding as dogs. Some studies show that they have the intelligence of up to a three year old child. They have their own rituals for giving birth and protecting their young. They want to give birth alone, and build their own birthing nest. I read an article from time to time about a pig escaping a farm to give birth in the woods, because that’s how strong their instincts are around birthing. All this makes knowing that pregnant pigs on industrial farms are kept confined in what are called gestation crates, where they can’t even lie down or move–even more heartbreaking. 

In talking to generational farmers, many are open to change but unsure how or where to even start while keeping up an income that is currently dependent on big ag. They keep a separation in their minds between all they know about pigs and their intelligence–I learned a lot of what I know about how smart these animals are from farmers–and the pigs they raise for food in painful conditions. Much like the circus trainer who had to quit when she understood the depth of the animal suffering, it seems the only way to keep going in that industry is to shut your mind to the animal's pain. 

Walking Alongside all Animals 

As stewards of the earth, we have to include animals in our walk for justice for all. Animals’ suffering deserves to be acknowledged and understood. Their pain should not be dismissed just because their flesh and bodies are sold for parts. We can learn from the birds who see trouble ahead, who see danger before we do and warn us of it. We can be the calls for liberation for all, so the animals are not screaming alone. Our food system isn’t working for such a big part of God’s creation–for animals, for people, or for the earth. We can have the courage to step outside the system to build something new, to look first within our communities. To look at the work being done by our neighbors and build upon it in unity. To build flourishing community gardens and plant-based pantries that keep families nourished and that engage the world around us without causing more harm. 

The wonder of God’s creation is that I see new parts of it everyday. I learn from the animals to be present to my surroundings. My family has a lot of bird feeders in our garden and about half the seed falls on the ground, which end up feeding the squirrels and sometimes a rat who has built a home somewhere in our yard. It’s truly one of my favorite things to do, to sit in the garden and watch the birds eat and bathe and then take off. It’s a gift to contribute to their plight. The other day I was watching a rat eat some of the seeds on the ground and for the first time it hit me how similar they look to squirrels when they are eating. They could be in the same family. It made me think about the human lens we put on rats, as inconvenient creatures to be feared and killed, when they have the same behaviors and looks and instincts as animals that we might smile at and think are cute. 

Our human lens isn’t complete, and those peaceful moments when we are open to seeing, to learning from the animals–who all share that bird seed together–those are the moments among thousands of moments that stay with me in my walk to be a doer of justice. God bless that rat.  

Companion Animals 

I can’t talk about the impact that so many animals have had on my life without thinking of my sweet dog Georgie. Georgie was around three years old when she was surrendered by a family who felt they couldn't take care of her anymore. Her energy was high and unpredictable. Her breed was used for hunting dogs, so they follow their instincts and are very fast. 

Her first family kept her tethered outside day and night to keep her from running. I imagine she got used to being on alert sleeping outside, unable to run to protect herself from the other dogs and animals on the property, or keep her food, or ward off danger. I have compassion for her first family who did all they could with the resources they had to care for Georgie, and I’m sure it was a hard decision to surrender her. Maybe with more help or resources, they wouldn't have had to. 

When Georgie came home with me, she had trauma from her first few years of life that I didn’t know, or understand, and some of it never fully went away. She bites when she feels trapped or when a boundary is crossed, and I had to learn what those boundaries were through some painful experiences. She is 11 years old now and has taught me more about life, myself, patience, unconditional love, happiness, and letting go of control of what I think the perfect outcome should be. Perhaps most importantly, she has taught me how to be willing to learn, grow, and live with another creature at their own pace. She can’t walk on her own anymore, and it’s a privilege to learn her new needs, to discover what tools and enrichment I can give her to keep up her quality of life, and provide her the peace and comfort that all animals deserve in their twilight years. Taking care of Georgie has been one of the greatest joys of my life. 

For the animals we share our homes and lives with, we learn their ins and outs and personalities as well as we know ourselves or our human family. They see, understand, and know us. As their guardians, we do our best to see, understand, and know them. This knowing is a comfort that all beings need and one that I dream all animals roaming the land, flying in the sky, and swimming in the sea will experience.  


Lastly, one of the sermons that has stuck with me from my childhood was at an Easter Sunday service where our pastor recounted a memory from his time in seminary. One day, he walked into his dorm room and saw his roommate using a knife to take the wooden carving of Jesus off of the cross that all the seminary students were given. His roommate explained that he would rather have an image of an open tomb to remember that Jesus has risen. I think this story is partly a memory for me because my Gram was visiting our church that Sunday and her gasp during this part of the service was heard by the whole congregation. The story wasn’t for everyone. But I think about that sermon now and can understand not wanting to define Jesus by the actions of his oppressors. I carry that sentiment today as we take care not to define farmed animals by the oppressive industrial world that looks at them as products instead of full beings with agency, inner worlds, feelings, and entire lives beyond the human lens. We acknowledge their pain, we don’t turn away, we keep our eyes open and our minds learning, and we stand alongside them—but their lives are not defined by the suffering that we have caused them.

A word of guidance in giving blessings to animals is to “be careful not to reinforce the separation of human animals and other animals in blessing. Instead, consider reinforcing our common kinship by blessing ALL animals–human and otherwise.” 1 The root of God’s creation is liberation–with people, with animals–not pushing them from behind or leading from the front, but being with them in solidarity. May God bless all the farmed and companion animals. May we walk, swim, and fly together in harmony. Amen.


1.Blessing of the Animals,” Let All Creation Praise. Last accessed June 16, 2022, http://www.letallcreationpraise.org/worship-services/blessing-of-the-animals.↩

The Body of Christ Has a Tail

By: Camila Mantovani

I want to start this conversation with you, reader, by telling a story that happened a few months ago in a small town in the state of São Paulo, Brazil.

It is the story of the buffalos from the city of Brotas.

It was in November last year that the police received a report that animals were being mistreated, and this led them to a farm named Agua Sumida. Once the police arrived, the scenario they found was devastating. There were more than 300 carcasses of buffaloes in a remote area that was isolated from the rest of the farm, as well as 1,056 buffaloes that were still alive but living in degrading conditions. They had no water or food and were badly wounded without medical care. Thanks to the mobilization of many activists and organizations fighting for animal welfare, today the farm and the animals are in the hands of a serious, ethical organization.

The events I’ve described happened because a farmer decided that his profit would come from the exploitation of buffaloes for the production of milk and cheese. At some point in the process, he changed his mind and decided that his farm would be more profitable as a monoculture. As such, he chose to grow soy for feed and decided to leave more than one thousand animals to die — animals he had once exploited but who no longer served a monetary purpose; animals whose exploitation had guaranteed the man’s wealth until that moment.

I have followed this story for months. I cried for each animal that could not recover, I cried to God for their lives, and I was filled with righteous indignation when I saw that the rich white man responsible for all of this continued to enjoy a life of privileges while the Black workers, who he also exploited, suffered the consequences of his actions and were incarcerated.

It was in between crying, reflection, and despair that I began to think about how sin distorts perspectives.

If there is a God who created everything that exists, and we are all God’s creatures, then the temptation of supremacy and domination must be what separates human animals from their proper place in creation. 

Some believe that being one species among all those God created is not good enough, not worthy enough. The white farmer, for example, decided to give himself the place he thought he deserved: the top of the hierarchy!  While at the top, he named himself the owner of everything, taking the role of God. 

The sin of speciesism is, among many things, the sin of vanity. 

In the world before the fall, before sin entered and changed humanity’s relationships with God and with other animals, creaturely relationships consisted of coexistence and harmony with the rest of creation. In the world after the fall, human beings have created a system in which animals no longer live for their own purposes, as designed by God, but now live and are raised on farms by industries to generate profit. Instead of being God's creatures, sinfully, they became human merchandise.

It is important to point out that this system of oppression is introduced in the world, especially in the Global South, through a long and devastating colonization process. Brazil was the last country in the world to abolish slavery of Black peoples, and even after that, these people were left with no options but to be exploited in the fields and on the farms, without dignity or rights. This system, which looks at non-human animals as merchandise, is directly connected to a slave system that also looked at Black and Indigenous people as chattel. It is the system that created a world completely opposite to the one created by God. It is a demonic distortion of what God created.

Even today, Black and Indigenous people suffer the direct consequences of the recent slavery past and also carry the burden of being the workers who are exploited by the industry that also exploits non-human animals. In the case of Indigenous people, there are more than 500 years of history of resistance in Brazil, including fighting for their land not to be stolen, destroyed, or used by large farms and industries that exploit animals. It is the profit of these industries and what they call "development" that have been used historically to justify the torture and extermination of non-human animals, but also the persecution and extermination of Indigenous peoples.

I grew up listening to sermons in church that condemned any ideology that put human beings in the center of the world because the place at the center belongs to God alone. And I am frightened today by the parts of the church that have been doing exactly that — removing God from the center and putting human beings in the center. This centering occurs when the church corroborates a food policy that exploits other animals, when it does not exercise its prophetic role of denouncing all the problems generated by the exploitation in the animal industry, or when it reinforces an ideology that places human beings above the rest of creation, a role that clearly belongs to God who created us all.

If parts of the Church have been historically silent in the face of a supremacist ideology that places human beings above the rest of creation, if parts of the Church have not only assisted but contributed to ways of living, consuming, and eating that constitute sin against God's creative holiness if we as a Church have preached against vanity but our actions reveal, instead, a sense of superiority, haven’t we removed God from the center of our theology, our worship, and our lives? Can we say we reflect the greatness of God in our lives if our lives instead reflect a great supremacist witness, far removed from the values of the Kin-dom of God?

“Don't be like the people of this world, but let God change the way you think. Then you will know how to do everything that is good and pleasing to God.

“I realize God has treated me with undeserved grace, and so I tell each of you not to think you are better than you really are. Use good sense and measure yourself by the amount of faith that God has given you.  A body is made up of many parts, and each of them has its own use. That's how it is with us. There are many of us, but we each are part of the body of Christ, as well as part of one another.”
Romans 12: 2-5 CEV version

It is only by changing our understanding of dominion and our place within the created order — not by conforming ourselves to the injustices of the world — that all creatures, including humans, will actually experience God's will. 

What is God's good, perfect, and pleasing will for non-human animals?

Is it that the list of endangered species gets longer and longer every year because of climate change, hunting, and industrial agriculture?  Or is God’s will that they fill and multiply on earth just as God called them to do in Genesis?

Is it God’s will for non-human animals to be used, tortured, and killed by industry? Or just as occurred in the story of Balaam, is it God’s intention for non-human animals to speak with humans and help us confront our sins by asking, “What did I do to you that you beat me like this?” (Numbers 22)

Let us not think of ourselves as more than we should. We are but one member in Christ's Body.

May I invite you to consider that the Body of Christ contains all the plurality and diversity of God's creation? 

Christ's Body has an arm, but it also has a paw, and a tail, and scales, and a snout, and is covered with wool, and has breasts that generate milk.

To ignore what has been done to animals by industrial agriculture and factory farms is to ignore what has been done to the Body of Christ.

How many more stories like that of the buffaloes in Brotas will take place before something changes?

How many workers will be made sick by animal cruelty and die?

Every great revival in human history is connected to a move of God that comes from the broken hearts of people who repent and cry out. Every great revival has brought about some significant change in culture and social structures.
I believe in a new revival, which will start from the movement of God before the repentant hearts of a generation that falls on its knees before the Lord and confesses its vanity, its arrogance, its historical sins against all members of the Body of Christ. I believe that there will come upon us the Fire of the Holy Spirit, able to change the reality around us, to stop the environmental collapses, to ensure the dignity of non-human animals, to ensure the end of the exploitation of human beings by human beings, to end the separation that sin has generated between us and the rest of creation and connect us again to the Creator.

Parenthood Interrupted

Content Warning: Loss of a child, police brutality, violence against animals.
Written by Sydney Caron

Near the cross of Jesus stood his mother… When Jesus saw his mother there, and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to her, “Woman, here is your son,” and to the disciple, “Here is your mother.” From that time on, this disciple took her into his home. - John 19:25-27

Participation in the CreatureKind Fellowship Program has provided me the opportunity to enter into a season of life-altering self-examination and repentance. 

In the program, I’ve explored monthly modules on the topics of Racism and Ecology, Christianity and Animals, Sex, Meat, and Labor, Disability Liberation, Climate Justice, the Animals Rights Movement, and Indigenous perspectives on Creation Justice.

Through monthly readings, reflections, and group discussions, I have observed one common theme present in each module: parenthood interrupted. 

The interruption of parenthood can be defined as the forced separation of the parent and the child. Forced separation includes emotional or physical distance, loss of kinship through forced estrangement and, far too often, death. 

If you begin to look for instances of parenthood being interrupted, you’ll find them. 

Parenthood is being interrupted by colonialism, capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. 


How is parenthood being interrupted by colonialism? 

Indigenous people, families, communities, and nations have experienced the interruption of parenthood through colonization. 

According to the book Indigenous Experiences of Pregnancy and Birth, policies such as birth evacuation, Western medical protocols, and colonially informed governance structures cause continual interruptions to the agency of Indigenous people. Lack of agency causes a colonialist influence over the ways Indigenous people carry, deliver, and raise their children. In response to the continued endurance of scrutiny by researchers, health professionals, and the general public, the “complex intersections between colonial processes and Indigenous women’s experiences with pregnancy and mothering” need further consideration and elevation. 1
On Instagram, @indigenousmotherhood seeks to “destroy colonialism through the tenderness, and wildness of Indigenous truth and love.”2This account highlights how Indigenous parenting practices have been stolen and rebranded, how to heal kinship systems in the midst of cycles of trauma, and how beautiful depictions of Indigenous parenthood are created by Indigenous artists.

Colonialism birthed residential schools, the sixties scoop, and the child welfare system. Societies, structures, and systems that perpetuate colonialist laws, ideals, and control continue to interrupt Indigenous parenthood. 


How is parenthood being interrupted by capitalism? 


Birth Parents, Adoptive Parents and Adoptees each experience the interruption of parenthood through industries and agencies that are structured by capitalist ideals. This is observable through the experiences of Transracial Adoptees adopted by white Americans. 

Based on interviews with adoptive mothers, social workers, and Korean birth mothers at an adoption agency in South Korea, the book Unequal Motherhoods and the Adoption of Asian Children: Birth, Foster, and Adoptive Parents, explores the impact of globalization through the adoption of Asian children by white Americans. It provides a critical examination of the widely held belief that the purpose of such adoptions is to improve the well-being and ensure the happiness of “poor abandoned children.” This belief has “helped obscure the roles of gender, nationality, power, and wealth inequalities in international adoption.”3

This sentiment is echoed in the article Toxic White Capitalism and Adoption: A Black Transracial Adoptee’s Perspective. The author, Nicole Monique Beede, a 26 year old Black Transracial Adoptee (TRA), notes that “prospective adoptive parents possess capital (money, medical resources, ‘acceptable’ homes, etc.), along with desperation, grief, and loneliness. They are an easy target to manipulate; the sense of urgency is already there. So what does that mean for Adoptees/Foster Youth/Children of non-White families? We are automatically seen as products.” Beede observes that “[w]hile the consumers, or Adoptive Parents, often have support throughout their investment and a lifetime warranty of organizations that cater to them, the product of the Adoption Industry, Adoptees, are left as an afterthought.” Beede concludes, “Unfortunately, until members of the Adoption Industry come to terms with their systemic toxicity, Adoptees will continue to be preyed upon.”4

Capitalism birthed an Adoption Industry that interrupts parenthood through the demonization of Birth Parents, the manipulation of Adoptive Parents and the isolation of Adoptees. 

How is parenthood being interrupted by white supremacy?  

It is difficult to find systems, structures, or institutions that are free of white supremacy. Its prevalence allows for the immediate and ongoing interruption of parenthood.

In Eileen Campbell-Reed’s most recent podcast episode on Three Minute Ministry Mentor, Rev. Dr. Angela Parker, a Womanist New Testament scholar, explores how the experiences of Black women, like Trayvon Martin's mother, Sybrina Fulton, are connected to God. Parker recognizes the significance of George Floyd’s struggle to breathe and his calling for his mother. She imagines the stifling of God’s breath during George Flloyd’s murder.5 Parker further explores mothering and motherhood as a continuation of breathing in Bitter the Chastening Rod: Africana Biblical Interpretation after Stony the Road We Trod in the Age of BLM, SayHerName, and MeToo.6

In Black Motherhood(s): Contours, Contexts and Considerations, Black motherhood is explored through the intersection of motherhood and womanism. It considers the impact of white supremacy but centers West African cosmology as the exemplar archetype of motherhood. By incorporating the power of self-definition, advocacy, and resistance, this model of motherhood is detached from Western patriarchal ideas of frailty and subordination, biological confines, and the barriers of race and gender-based hegemony that are upheld by white supremisicts.7

How is parenthood being interrupted by the patriarchy? 

The patriarchy is a threat to reproductive justice.

Reproductive justice, a term coined by the Women of African Descent for Reproductive Justice in 1994, requires that “every individual be able to make their own choices about their reproductive life, and have access to reproductive health services. Reproductive justice also requires that all people have the ability to raise children in safe and healthy environments. It encompasses not only reproductive rights, but also the social, economic, and political conditions that impact whether and how individuals are able to parent with dignity.”8

The patriarchy has birthed beliefs, laws and policies that seek to criminalize, dominate and control the womb instead of seeking to protect bodily autonomy for all genders equally. Removing a person’s right to make their own choices about their reproductive life, continues to interrupt parenthood.  
Parenthood is interrupted by colonialism, capitalism, white supremacy and patriarchy. 
It is also interrupted by ableism, transphobia, fatphobia, and homophobia. 
Again, if you begin to look for instances of parenthood being interrupted, you’ll find them.

Parenthood is being interrupted. Not only in the human-animal experience of parenthood, but in the non-human animal experience of parenthood too. 

How is the non-human animal experience of parenthood being interrupted? 

The parenthood of the Sumatran Orangutan is interrupted by the felling and burning of their rainforest home by palm oil corporations that produce half of the packed products in supermarkets. 

The parenthood of the Sturgeon is interrupted by an incision in the belly, the removal of the ovaries, the harvesting of the eggs, driven by human demand to consume caviar. 

The parenthood of the Orca Whale is interrupted when they are denied their natural life within a matriarchal pod only to be held in captivity for the thrill of human entertainment.

Through the consumption of dairy products and meat, we can find an example of parenthood being interrupted present with us at each of our meals.

Farmed animals experience the interruption of parenthood at a rate too quickly and too cruelly to properly measure. 

Parenthood is interrupted when a cow is made to endure indefinite separation from the calf they have just birthed. 

Parenthood is interrupted when pigs are deprived of their ability to practice their natural nurturing behaviors, like “singing” to their young while they nurse.

Parenthood is interrupted when an affectionate protective mother hen who communicates with her chicks while they’re still in their eggs is denied the opportunity to witness them hatch.

Parenthood is interrupted when those who work in the agriculture industry are separated from their children in order to work long hours for low wages in unsafe working conditions.

Childhood is interrupted when parents seek to prevent forced separation from their children by bringing their children to work with them. 

Parenthood is interrupted by illness, disease, and food insecurity caused by the placement and operation of factories, slaughterhouses, and processing facilities. 

The impact of the interruption of parenthood in the lives of non-human animals is a lot like the impact it has on humans: death, destruction, and a growing distance between God and God’s Creation.   

What does it mean for me, as a part of the Church-at-large, to be in ministry centering the welfare of farmed animals? 

Exploring the interruption of parenthood has allowed me to further discern what it means for me, as a part of the Church-at-large, to be in ministry centering the welfare of farmed animals. 

The interruption of parenthood is an experience that Mary had while Jesus was dying on the cross. 

In John 19:25-27, Mary is about to experience the loss of her child. Mary’s motherhood is about to be interrupted. Jesus recognizes his mother’s changing role — from motherhood to childlessness. Jesus responds by entrusting his mother to the disciple whom he loved. In doing so, Jesus provides Mary with an opportunity to re-inhabit the role of motherhood following its interruption. Jesus, making a way out of no way, interrupts the interrupting of parenthood. Upon Jesus’s resurrection, Mary’s earthly motherhood continues as faith reshapes and bonds a new family unit between Mary and John, while Mary’s heavenly motherhood is recognized as eternal. 

Mary’s motherhood was interrupted and parenthood continues to be interrupted today.

To be in ministry centering the welfare of farmed animals involves recognizing the Church’s communal responsibility to engage in, advocate for, and celebrate the liberation of parents and children throughout all of Creation.

Liberating the parent means liberating the child, a cycle the Church must now seek to participate in.

This involves dismantling systems that require, uphold, and enable the interruption of parenthood. 

All forms of oppression must be named, challenged, and repented of. Including the numerous accounts of historical and contemporary interruptions of parenthood that the Church has sanctioned, supported and funded. 

We must continue to decolonize our faith. 

Can we, the Church, imitate Jesus and interrupt the interrupting of parenthood?

Can we choose to interrupt the interrupting of parenthood instead of perpetuating it? 

Can the instances of parenthood being interrupted that are present with us at each meal act as a call to action? 

If you begin to look for instances of parenthood being interrupted, you’ll find them.

As we seek to safeguard the integrity of Creation, may each of us witness the prevalence of the interruption of parenthood and respond through prayer and action.

For those who witness the interruption of parenthood and those who experience it, may you find comfort and rest in the reminder that through the death and resurrection of Jesus, the interruption of parenthood has been interrupted for good.

May each of us continue to repent of this sin that we participate in and continually return to God’s way of love and liberation for the whole of Creation. 

Works Cited:

  • Craddock, Karen T. Black Motherhoods: Contours, Contexts and Considerations. Demeter Press, 2015. Kindle. 

  • Gill, Jungyun. Unequal Motherhoods and the Adoption of Asian Children. Lexington Books, 2016. Kindle. 

  • Parker, Rev. Dr. Angela. “3MMM: Embodied and Relational Reading” interview by Eileen Campbell-Reed. Three Minute Ministry Mentor, Apple Podcast, March 8th, 2022, audio, 15:28. 

  • Parker, Rev. Dr. Angela. “3MMM: Embodied and Relational Reading” interview by Eileen Campbell-Reed. Three Minute Ministry Mentor, Apple Podcast, March 8th, 2022, audio, 16:13. 

  • Salty. “Toxic White Capitalism and Adoption: A Black Transracial Adoptee’s Perspective.” Accessed May 13th, 2022. https://saltyworld.net/toxic-white-capitalism-and-adoption-a-black-transracial-adoptees-perspective/ 

  • Shahram, Sana Z. “Indigenous Pregnancy, Birthing, and Mothering in Colonial Canada.” In Indigenous Experiences of Pregnancy and Birth, edited by Hannah Tait Neufeld and Jaime Cidro, 13–29. Demeter Press, 2017. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1vw0sbs.6.

Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund. “Reproductive Justice.” Accessed May 13th, 2022. https://www.leaf.ca/issue-area/reproductive-justice/.

Easter and the More-than-Human World

*This sermon was given by CreatureKind co-Founder David Clough at the Eastertide Earth Day Service on April 22nd, 2022. You can see the full service here. 

If I’m a little bleary-eyed, it’s because Aline, Karla, and I have just returned from a meeting that CreatureKind sponsored of representatives of US churches and Christian organizations. It was an exciting 48 hours and a significant step in our work towards getting animal agriculture on the agenda of US churches. The meeting was held at Airlie House in Virginia, which is where the idea of Earth Day was first announced in 1969. The grounds of the house were full of trees in pink blossom, which felt appropriate for me for the week after Easter.

I mention that, because in the Northern Hemisphere, the celebration of Easter in the spring means that images of new life in nature are an obvious reference point for talking about resurrection.

Perhaps Easter is the time in the Christian year when you’re more likely to hear the more-than-human creation mentioned in preaching.

In the Easter service I attended last Sunday, we sang the hymn “Now the green blade rises from the buried grain” inspired by Jesus’s teaching of John 12:24, which says “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”

Perhaps you heard similar references in services you attended. It’s good to recognize what’s going on here. Jesus’s teaching about seeds and new life is drawing attention to how the more-than-human creation speaks to us about God. Easter imagery of eggs, spring flowers, bunny rabbits, is all doing the same thing, and we should celebrate with humility how we may learn from fellow creatures about the ways of their creator and ours.

It’s much less common, however, to think about the connection between Easter and other-than-human creatures in the opposite direction. What does God’s work in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ mean for creation beyond the human? That’s what I’d like us to reflect on for the next few minutes, with the help of two passages from scripture, Psalm 104 and Colossians 1:15–20.

Psalm 104

Let’s start with Psalm 104. It’s a central piece of creation theology in the Bible, setting out God’s provision for a diverse range of creatures, including wild animals, domesticated animals, and humans, but seeing them all together, as creaturekind, we might say. Each creature has their own place, each receives what they need to survive from God’s hand. The Psalm is an amazing vision of God’s attentive care for every kind of creature.

I think our reading of the Psalm needs to go further, informed by three different pieces of context:

First, we need to lament that human activity has failed to respect the places for God’s creatures laid out in the Psalm. The Psalm celebrates the God who makes space for all creaturely kinds, but we live in a world where humans and domesticated animals now represent 96% of the biomass of the earth’s mammals, where domesticated chickens are three times the biomass of all wild birds, and where we have depleted wild fish stocks by 90%. We have taken wild animals from their divinely assigned places, put them in cages and warehouses that prevent them from fulfilling their vocation as God’s creatures, and have reshaped their bodies to make them ever more efficient units of human production. Jungle fowl have been turned into broiler chickens and caged laying hens, unable to forage for food, roost in trees, or dustbathe, with the sensitive tips of their beaks removed to avoid them injuring others in overcrowded cages and warehouses. Wild boar have been made into intensively farmed pigs, unable to root in the earth, with their tails cut off to prevent them chewing on one another out of boredom and frustration. Salmon and trout have been prevented from making migrations of hundreds of miles and instead are kept in bare tanks and sea cages predisposing them to painful disease.

What can it mean to worship God as the one who has made a place for every creature in the knowledge that humans have taken those places away?

Second, we need to recognize that even at the time when the psalm was first composed, humans had been responsible for making other animals extinct. It seems likely that a global human population of no more than five million between around 50,000 and 3,000 years ago contributed to the Quaternary Megafauna Extinction that made around half of large land mammals extinct. So while relationships between humans and other animals are very much worse today, the Psalm was not written at a time of human innocence in relation to fellow animal creatures.

Third, it is sobering to realize that the vast majority of living creatures who have ever lived on earth were already extinct before humans arrived on the earth. Close to 99% of species had become extinct when the psalmist wrote this psalm. What does it mean to affirm God as the one who makes a place for every creature in the knowledge that most of those habitats and creatures are gone?

It seems to me that reflecting on Psalm 104 in relation to these three contexts means we cannot read it merely as a celebration of God’s creation and providence. We must read it instead as a vision of the fulfillment of God’s will for creatures, just as we read in Isaiah’s vision of peace between creatures, seen in Isaiah 11 and 65 and in Paul’s vision of a creation set free from bondage in Romans 8. Psalm 104 affirms that God’s will is for each creature to have a place suitable for their flourishing and to receive all that they need. That is not the case today. It was not even the case when the psalm was written. But our scriptures affirm it is God’s will for creatures.

Col. 1:15–20

That brings us to our second reading, Colossians 1:15-20, which is one of the earliest reflections on the significance of God’s work in Jesus Christ. The passage identifies Jesus as the firstborn of all creation, before all things, in whom all things were created, in whom all things hold together, the firstborn from the dead, in whom the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through whom God was pleased to reconcile to Godself all things in earth and heaven, making peace through the blood of the cross.

This passage makes absolutely clear that God’s work in Jesus Christ matters not just for human beings, but for all things in heaven and earth. The passage leaves no doubt about the cosmic implications of what took place on Good Friday and Easter Sunday. “All things,” ta panta in the Greek, is repeated five times in this short passage just to make sure there’s no possibility of misunderstanding. God’s work of reconciliation in Jesus Christ makes peace between all things in heaven and earth. If we take Colossians seriously, we can’t avoid recognizing that the message of Easter is nothing less than cosmic in scope.

Of course, Colossians is no outlier in its understanding of the cosmic scope of God’s graciousness towards creatures. Genesis 1 and 2 celebrate God’s creation of all creatures and God’s declaration of them as good in themselves. Psalm 104 is just one example of where God’s concern for all kinds of creatures is affirmed in the wisdom literature, echoed in other psalms and notably in the closing chapters of the Book of Job. Other prophets alongside Isaiah affirm a time of peace for humans and other creatures. John’s gospel tells us that the reason for the incarnation was that God so loved the world, the cosmos in Greek. And Revelation 5 shares the vision in Romans 8 of the participation of other-than-human creatures in God’s redemption — picturing every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, and all that is in them — singing praises to the lamb.

Given all this, it is mystifying to me that Christians could ever have come to the conclusion that God was only interested in one of the myriad creaturely kinds on earth, or that God’s work in Jesus Christ, celebrated at Easter, was of relevance only to members of the single Homo sapiens. The scriptures passed down to us affirm the inclusion of all creatures as recipients of God’s grace in creation, reconciliation, and redemption. Easter is Earth Day: the affirmation of God’s will for all earth’s creatures. Praise God! 

The task before us

Let’s make sure to take time during this Easter season to recognize and celebrate the meaning of Easter for all God’s creatures. It’s a time to dwell in the gladness of the cosmic implications of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

For those who see this deep truth there is also a task, a responsibility, and a vocation before us. It’s the task, responsibility, and vocation that drives the whole of CreatureKind’s work. Many people haven’t heard the good news for creation that Easter brings. That includes people outside the church, many of whom have decided that the church has nothing to say about care for animals or the wider creation. But it also includes many within the church, who have been taught a Christianity that is woefully neglectful of the meaning of Easter faith for all God’s creatures. That means it’s no surprise that many Christians consume without thinking about the products of industrial animal agriculture that bring such devastating impacts on farmed animals, wild animals, racially and economically oppressed humans, and our shared environment. They give no thought to their complicity with industrial animal agriculture because they have not heard Easter preached except as something that matters only for humans like them.

So as those who see the implications of Easter for all God’s creatures, let’s recommit ourselves to sharing that good news, reaching out to those we meet within and beyond our churches with the vision of God’s redemption of creation and its practical implications for our responsibility to live more peaceably here and now among our fellow creatures.

Amen!

DefaultVeg: De-centering Whiteness in Veganism and Working for the Liberation of All

by: Megan Grigorian

I started my career working in the US animal movement space two days after my college graduation in 2008. I was a twenty-one year old able-bodied, white, cis-gender woman with an English degree, a new-found passion for veganism, and a job writing copy for an animal rights organization. I learned about all the awful ways that animals suffer on industrial farms for food, and I was excited to do work that I thought made the world a little better for them. The concept of my privilege in this space did not occur to me until years later, nor did the knowledge gaps in my advocacy that made an inclusive and holistic approach to work in a social justice movement difficult at best, harmful at worst. For years my approach and perspectives were shaped exclusively by white people–white peers and leaders, white representation of animal advocacy in the media, and a white, Euro-American experience with food and diet. 

My ignorance to my whiteness, power, and privilege caused me to remain unaware of how the white vegan movement brings about harm. Only through a series of events and conversations over many years —along with reading, listening, reflecting, and seeking direct exposure and education to the nuances of the industrial farming industry — did my perspective begin to widen. By the time I got to CreatureKind, I was beginning to see that I cannot talk about the injustices of animals used in the farming industry without also talking about the people who suffer in the same industry. By centering whiteness and prescribing white veganism in animal advocacy, BIPOC communities that understand these issues way more than white people do are left out of the conversation. There are so many factors to ensuring that everyone on God’s earth is nourished, with access to their own land and healthy nourishing food — going vegan cannot be the only one-size fits all prescription. 

Over the years, I came to realize through education that my “go vegan” approach lacked nuance and was upholding a captilastic, white supremacist food system that creates the problems I was fighting against in the first place. By looking at only how animals suffer, I was asking for change to the part of the industry that I didn’t like, while doing nothing to question the parts of the industry that harm marginalized communities the most. After more than a decade in this space, I had to reevaluate my own motivations for doing this work when I found myself, for the most part, always surrounded by white people making the decisions. Was I drawn to this movement as an invitation to be righteous on behalf of a species whose language I do not speak and who will never challenge my words, views, or actions? Why did I think I had the authority to tell people how to feed themselves and their families? As the number of vegan options in the grocery stores and restaurants around me rise, while the number of animals killed on farms increases, is the vegan movement really working? I was telling people to “go vegan” out of compassion for animals, without understanding, or frankly caring, where that vegan food would come from or who really had access to it.

The mainstream US vegan, animal rights, and welfare spaces from the top have largely been occupied by white people, with many orgs, until recently, being run by cis-gender white men. Similarly, 95% of the nation’s farmers are white. Yet, many farm, field, and slaughterhouse workers are BIPOC — without legal protection, livable wages, or safe working conditions. The farmers in the US who are Black — many who focus on growing vegetables —  have to fight for funding that is being blocked by white farmers. Food insecurity across the country, as well as access to fresh, nutritious and affordable food, impacts BIPOC communities the most. 

The issues that affect the people who are harvesting our food cannot be ignored by those who  talk about farmed animal welfare. They are injustices that exist because our food system centers white people with easy access to current capitalist structures. The work we do to dismantle that system cannot do the same thing if we want to work towards an equitable, safe, loving world that protects all of God’s creation and ensures their flourishing upon the earth. 

A little ways into my first year of animal advocacy, I had a meaningful conversation with my dad. He wasn’t particularly religious then, and he was a pretty enthusiastic meat-eater at the time, so what he said surprised me. He said I was doing “God’s work.” I never really understood what he meant, and only in the last few years, working with CreatureKind and getting to learn from the perspectives of our leaders, fellows, and contributors, have I begun to understand how valuing the life of all God’s creation, not excluding the earth, human beings, ourselves, and animals, is inherently a spiritual principle. It’s what Jesus preached. It’s what we are called as Christians to do. All of God’s creatures deserve liberation. The work of CreatureKind’s food policy campaigns is committed to pursuing liberation for all, including those with the least power in the current hierarchies. 

I have been a plant-based eater for sixteen years, and I feel that it sits right with my own spiritual practice. I do not practice a plant-based diet perfectly, and I still have a ways to go toward decolonizing my plate. At CreatureKind, we want to work in solidarity with small-scale, ethical farms and communities toward food sovereignty, so everyone can have access to safe, nourishing, culturally-significant foods that feed their bodies and their souls, while protecting the whole of God’s creation. 

CreatureKind’s DefaultVeg program is an entry point for all communities to start thinking about the food we eat when we gather in ritual or celebration. What food brings us joy? Where does it come from? How was it grown and prepared? Who are we supporting (and not supporting) with the food we consume? Does our communion/community table center liberation of all beings impacted by factory farming? These answers will not be the same for everyone.The program can and should take into consideration accessibility and be tailored to the community's needs. Such attention takes time, effort, and intentionality, but at CreatureKind, we believe liberative, equitable eating is worth it. We’re here to support your efforts and offer guidance as you consider what DefaultVeg should look like in your community, too.

We are looking forward this year to celebrating multicultural foods and traditions that center BIPOC communities, while focusing on strategies that pursue decolonization. We warmly invite you in on this journey with us, as we keep learning together.  

To start a DefaultVeg program in your church, organization, class, community, or small group please reach out, and let's begin the conversation. 

“Be still and know…” A Lenten Reflection

As I write, I am preparing for the season of Lent.

Lent this year has come at exactly the right time. Oh, how we need God’s invitation: “Be still and know that I Am God.” (Ps 46:10) It’s all too easy to be dismayed by events in the world, both near and far away. For many of us, anxiety is a sickly layer on our skin, and the air feels thick with fear

The season of Lent, when we remember Jesus’s forty days in the wilderness, invites us to make space to actively pay attention, listen, look, and wait for God’s kind and loving Presence as we prepare to celebrate Easter. Lent invites us to be honest about our own pain, disappointment, or apathy, as well as “to bear witness to the suffering of the world.” 1 It invites us to lay aside things that we turn to for distraction instead of looking to God. It invites us to repent and return to God from the unhealthy places to which we’ve wandered away. It also invites us to align our hearts and actions with the Kin-dom values that Jesus taught and demonstrated as He bid His disciples, “Follow Me”.

Lent is a deeply personal journey I undertake every year. It can be both restful and hard. I will miss the comforts I’ve decided to forgo, but I look forward to the lovely practices I’ll begin for my own soul’s delight. I’m weary, so I expect it will be a difficult daily choice to expand the times that I will make to be more present with God in silence and prayer. 

This reflective work looks both inward and outward because I know I exist within widening concentric circles of community that start close and eventually span the globe. I share this earth with my close family and friends, and with billions of neighbors—human and animal creatures—with whom my own well-being is intrinsically tied. So, Lent for me also must acknowledge the places where this interconnectedness and mutual dependency are troubled.

Therefore, as I examine my ways during this Lenten season, I will pay attention to my social location and participation within the systems that affect my fellow earth-sharers. We live within many complex systems built on injustices of every kind, rotten to the bone. This year I am particularly focused upon the food system, examining ways my participation might need to be reimagined and changed.

Globally, the dominant systems that regulate the production, supply, and consumption of food are rooted in oppression and violence to human and animal creatures, the Earth, and the environment. Increasingly, food systems are industrializing their production methods, and they are consolidating into fewer corporations that process, distribute, and sell the food we eat, especially in wealthier countries (the countries of the Global North). In South Africa, where I live, four supermarket corporations now dominate the food system, exerting power over food access and prices. 

Globally, food corporations control many of the pathways where food travels, from farms to our plates, telling us what we can eat so that they can maximize their profits. The animals as well as the people laboring to produce or process our food are exploited under regulations that are grossly inadequate. Their well-being is of little value as they live and work under awful conditions. The earth is badly treated for short-term profits, and our environment is being harmed. 

In the ways that crop farming has been intensified by using economies of scale to produce the highest yields, the same has applied to animal farming. Corporations have moved into the business of farming animals, in many places replacing smaller family farms. This is happening in many countries.

By treating animals as production units, large numbers of animals live packed into Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), commonly known as factory farms. Factory farming doesn’t look much like farming. The animals are bred and fed to grow as rapidly as possible so that profits can bank more quickly. In their shortened lives, they can’t behave naturally according to their species. After they are transported to slaughterhouses, the stressed animals are killed on production lines that often move so rapidly that the animals don’t always die quickly, and the safety of the workers is very much at risk. 

CAFOs are terrible news for the animals and workers involved, but we don’t see this when we buy our meat, dairy, and egg products from the supermarket. The suffering and horror are hidden by the plastic wrap and marketing labels showing pictures of happy animals and idyllic farms.

We don’t see the evils because CAFOs are located on enclosed lands in rural communities. In the USA and to some extent globally, CAFOs are largely placed in economically vulnerable communities that are over-represented by People of Color. When many animals are confined to live densely packed together, there are risks for public health and for the environment, especially in surrounding areas. These communities have to live with the stench, the environmental damage, and the pathogens that leach from the CAFOs, infecting their air and water sources.

Intensified farming is relatively new to the world. It has only gained momentum over the past seventy years. But the system is already so entrenched that many of us don’t notice what is happening right under our noses as we fry our bacon and eat our cheesy omelets. It all seems too normal! Because we are disconnected from the sources of our food we don’t know what is happening to bring it to our kitchens. 

This season of Lent can be a time to pay attention to our food systems. It can be the opportunity to look beyond the packaging and begin naming the evils done to produce our food. It can be a chance to seek more connection with food sources, even if that’s done in very small steps. 

Lent is a good season to pay special attention to what is happening in God’s Kin-dom, and to bear witness to the suffering of fellow earth-sharers. It’s a sacred window to be still and allow ourselves to be shaped by our nurturing, loving God. 

The Ugandan theologian Emmanuel Katongole writes:

The salvation promised by God to God’s people, to which the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus is a witness, is not merely spiritual: it is a concrete social, material, political, and economic reality that is ushered into existence by God’s revelation in history. The failure of Christian social imagination is a failure to imagine and live in this new reality, which in 2 Corinthians 5:17 St Paul refers to as God’s “new creation.”2

With God’s present help, during Lent we can both lament the oppressive systems of our world, and we can seek social imagination for systems and participation that reflect God’s love for all of Creation.

“Be still and know that I Am God.”

1. Cole Arthur Riley (@blackliturgies), Instagram graphic, February 26, 2022, https://www.instagram.com/p/Cac1leHOnoM/?utm_medium=copy_link. ↩
2. Emmanuel Katongole, The Sacrifice of Africa: A Political Theology for Africa (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 2011), 11.↩

Deepening our Creation Imaginations

By Jayda Kechour

I have chosen to share what I have learned from three of our readings through CreatureKind. The first reading is a book by Randy Woodley, Shalom and the Community of Creation: An Indigenous Vision. Woodley’s book stirs within me a call to pursue a life of shalom. His book reminds me that if one part of creation is suffering then we are not living in complete harmony and wholeness. Woodley calls readers to be a part of the healing and reconciliation process on earth with all creatures by looking at the ministry of Jesus which is congruent with the Harmony Way through Indigenous perspectives. The second reading is a book by Sunaura Taylor named Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation. Taylor clearly reveals how all living beings, those disabled and those not, suffer from systems created by humans that are disabling and oppressing through ableism. Taylor has helped shape my disability theology and has convinced me that disability and animal liberation must go hand in hand. Lastly, the third reading is a book by Melanie L. Harris titled Ecowomanism: African American Women and Earth-Honoring Faiths. Harris teaches the importance of environmental justice perspectives by women of color particularly women of African descent. I have learned how necessary ecowomanist perspectives are in understanding earth justice and liberation for all creatures. These three readings have deepened my faith and have inspired me to reshape my role with creation care and justice as a follower of Jesus. 

Ministrocentric

We are one part of creation. In Randy Woodley’s book Shalom and the Community of Creation: An Indigenous Vision, Woodley shares that Indigenous views reveal that life is both biocentric and anthropogenic. Indigenous views show that humans uniquely relate to the rest of creation. This view is described as ministrocentric which means that life is centered on serving creation, maintaining harmony, assuring reciprocity, conducting ceremonies of mediation, and more, to maintain harmony and restore harmony whenever it is broken. A ministrocentric life is one of restoring harmony through gratitude, reciprocity and ceremony between our Creator, humans, and all other members of creation.1 This view is sacred and meaningful. How can Christians live out the role of maintaining and restoring harmony? I learned through Woodley that living a shalom life means we must be intentional about bringing balance and harmony to creation. I extend Woodley’s offer and invite us to imitate Jesus’s ministry of shalom. Woodley explains the heart of shalom:
A society concerned with shalom will care for the most marginalized among them. God has a special concern for the poor and needy, because how we treat them reveals our hearts, regardless of the rhetoric we employ to make ourselves sound just. Jeremiah 22:16 (NLT) equates the social task of caring to revealing a genuine relationship with God: '[King Josiah] gave justice and help to the poor and needy, and everything went well for him. ‘Isn’t that what it means to know me?’ says the LORD.2

First, “a society concerned with shalom will care for the most marginalized among them.” Are we caring for those most marginalized? I ask, “how do I benefit unknowingly or knowingly from an unjust system while others experience harm?” Caring for justice and sharing compassion to others is to know God better. 

Nonhuman Creature Justice

During high school I began to realize how my food choices were being made at the expense of the captivity, torment, and suffering of nonhuman creatures. Sunaura Taylor elaborates in her book Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation that the disability farmed animals experience is inseparable from the environment humans create.

The mother pig is made utterly immobile not by physical difference or disease but by the metal bars of her gestation crate. The hen suffers from pain, but whether that pain is due to a broken leg, overcrowding, complete darkness, or the death of her cagemate is impossible to know. The dairy cow is euthanized not because she cannot walk but because she has become a symbol of contamination.3
It was easy for me to go to the grocery store and buy packages of cheap meat without knowing details about the lives behind these containers. I learned that cows, pigs, and chickens are part of our most marginalized neighbors in creation. I had been benefiting from a shattering system, one contrary to peace and harmony. God created nonhuman creatures to flourish, roam, and have an abundance of clean air, fresh water, and nutritious food from the earth. The more I learned about the pain and death that nonhuman creatures experience on a massive scale every single day, the more I wanted to be vegan. As a beloved child of Abba, 4 I want to live a life that supports creation like our Creator does. I have yet to experience a church setting that addresses environmental sin or how God’s plants and nonhuman creatures are not being loved well by humans. If we pursue a life of shalom as followers of Jesus, we must soften our ears and listen to the marginalized. Taylor writes, “We choose to ignore cries from nonhuman creatures.”5 Indian author and political activist Arundhati Roy poignantly writes, “There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless.’ There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.”6
For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies.7 Human imaginations are powerful gifts from the Creator. They allow us to consider realities that commonly provide for human consumption, yet would not be witnessed by most humans on a daily basis, such as the cries of nonhuman creatures in horrifying food production settings. They speak to us every day when they cry out in pain or try to move away from our prods, electrodes, knives, and stun guns. Animals tell us constantly that they want out of their cages, and that they want to be reunited with their families, or that they don’t want to walk down the kill chute. Animals express themselves all the time, and many of us know it. If we didn’t, factory farms and slaughterhouses would not be designed to constrain any choices an animal might have.8

Disability Justice

Through her book Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation, Sunaura Taylor has helped me understand that all bodies are subjected to the oppression of ableism.

All animals–both those we human beings would call disabled and those we would not–are devalued and abused for many of the same basic reasons disabled people are. They are understood as incapable, as lacking in the various abilities and capacities that have long been held to make human lives uniquely valuable and meaningful. They are, in other words oppressed by ableism. 9
Taylor discusses ableism and animals and she highlights an important argument. Taylor argues that beings with neurotypical human capacities must not be inherently more valuable than those without.10 Cathryn Bailey, a feminist scholar furthers the conversation and says, “the problem is not reason itself but rather the ways in which reason has been held up as separate from and more valuable than emotion, feeling, and other ways of knowing and being.”11 As a human, and a follower of Jesus, how can I care and love living beings just for their being? I argue we need to expand our imaginations about who we are as humans in creation and how mysterious and wonderful our neighbors are. “We are just beginning to comprehend the vast array of abilities found on this planet, and human abilities are but a small fraction of them.”12 Our imaginations must be tied to shalom. In other words, shalom is to view everything as sacred because our Creator cares for all. Each day creation invites us to humbly appreciate the intricacies of every living being and teaches us that everything connects us to our Creator. How can we view and treat nonhuman farmed creatures and humans with and without disabilities as sacred? How can our food systems be environments of flourishing rather than disabling for humans and nonhumans? Are we willing to stop supporting factory farms where countless lives of nonhuman creatures are massacred and disabled? Are we willing to follow Jesus and allow these creatures to be in a thriving environment? I hope so.

Ecowomanism

Ecowomanism: African American Women and Earth-Honoring Faiths by Melanie L. Harris is 

critical reflection, contemplation, and praxis-oriented study of environmental justice from the perspectives of women of color and particularly women of African descent. It links a social justice agenda with ecojustice, recognizing the parallel oppressions that women of color have often survived when confronting racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, and similar oppressions that the earth is facing through environmental degradation.13

I am thankful for Harris’s wisdom because I feel that I and communities of faith where I belong/frequent/participate in would benefit from her reflection on climate justice.

At the same time that conceptualizing the unique connections women have with the planet as mother, or the feminization of the planet, can serve as a connecting point to the lives of women, there is also an eerie familiarity to the structural nature of violence that the earth has faced (ecoviolence) and the structural forms of violence that black women have faced historically. 14

Structural violence that Black women have endured are interwoven to the violence of mother earth. Reading the voices of African and African American women in Harris’ book resonates within me the necessity to include ecowomanist methodologies so we can not only learn their histories and traditions but also follow their leadership which is transformative and centers earth justice. Christians are called to “act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God,” therefore, ecowomanism can lead us with deeper connection with justice issues that impact our planet and people on its margins. From them we can become more aware of environmental changes and implement climate smart practices for our collective future. I argue that one of the urgent needs of the Western American churches is to understand justice issues such as environmental justice, climate justice, and food and land sovereignty as connected to animal liberation, disability inclusion, and Black and Indigenous lives, to name a few. Christians can take part in the incarnational hope of Jesus and ecowomanist lessons are pivotal to this ministry.

Revelations

As I reflect on how I have grown through CreatureKind, I recognize new perspectives, dreams, ideas, and voices within me that have been strengthened. The books we read are achingly compelling. I feel a forceful tug from our readings, which constantly pushes me to reshape and rebuild my role in creation. I am beginning to unpeel layers of systems that exploit and disable living beings. I feel like I am holding the cheeks of stories interwoven on pages that are shattering-liberating-and yet, I feel as if I am only gazing at the ripples of chilling waters into which I have not yet had to plunge. I am learning more that I am easily disheartened and overwhelmed by the world and environmental perils, the state of mother earth and where we are heading. Yet, there is hope. Earth is active, breathing; she is well-alive. As Chris Doran illuminates in his book, Hope in the Age of Climate Change, expectational hope for all of creation to be reconciled with God one day means that we are to actively bring hope alive on earth now.15What an invitation and a daring honor. How can Christians help create a life for nonhuman creatures, such as farmed animals, to live in a way that is even a pale reflection of the hope still to come? We must dig deeper in church settings and address despairing structural systems so that we can support or create new ones that are more justiceoriented. Our imagination for creation needs to grow deeper. Through CreatureKind, I have learned words such as ministrocentric, ableism, and ecowomanism, as well as perspectives from authors who are Indigenous, Black female, and disabled. I anticipate learning more rich insight about climate and ocean justice in our following readings. Specifically, I feel more connected to my Godgiven dream through CreatureKind than I ever have before. The more I learn from CreatureKind’s mission to care for animal welfare in faith communities, I learn about my authentic design in Christ. I am created to love my neighbors well and help bring hope and reconciliation on earth for all creation to flourish. My dream is this:

Route to Roots / Jayda’s Farm

The soil is rich with microorganisms. Rescued cows, pigs, and chickens find shelter and roam freely on the land. The hungry people are enjoying a rich vegan meal outside in the grass on wooden tables with colorful cushions. The dishes are cooked by the community with ingredients straight from the growing garden as an act of sovereignty and resistance. There is praise and dancing. Nonhuman creatures are thriving eating alongside human creatures, as we all abundantly feast from the bounty of the earth. Peoples, once displaced from the land are safe from environmental harm and other violence, feasting as one. We are thankful. We pray and thank our Creator for the gift of earth’s precious food. This land is home for all to return to the route of our roots. We are all soil creatures, loved by our Creator.

How are your Godlysized dreams serving the whole community of creation?

1. Woodley, Randy. Shalom and the Community of Creation: An Indigenous Vision (Prophetic Christianity Series (PC)), 2012. 61↩
2. Woodley, Shalom and the Community of Creation: An Indigenous Vision, 25.]↩
3. Taylor Sunaura, Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation, New York: (The New Press, 2016), 38.↩
4. God as Father↩
5. Sunaura, Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation, 62.↩
6. Sunaura, Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation, 62.↩
7. Romans 8:19-23, NIV.↩
8. Sunaura, Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation, 63.↩
9. Sunaura, Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation, 21.↩
10. Sunaura, Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation, 70.↩
11. Sunaura, Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation, 71↩
12. Sunaura, Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation, 79.↩
13. Melanie L. Harris, Ecowomanism: African American Women and Earth-Honoring Faiths, New York: (Orbis Books, 2017), (Kindle Location 2619). Kindle Edition. ↩
14. Harris, Ecowomanism: African American Women and Earth-Honoring Faiths, 2630↩
15. Chris Doran, Hope in the Age of Climate Change: Creation Care This Side of the Resurrection, Oregon: (Cascade Books, 2017).↩

Representing God to Creation

by Liesl Stewart

Artist: Zach Stewart

As we’ve collectively lived the trauma of this global pandemic, I’ve often pondered how fragile our lives truly are. For many of us, our lives have been painfully impacted and disrupted by the spread of a virus we can’t even see without a microscope.

The second chapter of Genesis tells the story of God creating humankind from the dust, giving our species life that we carry fragilely within our bodies of ‘clay’. Additionally, the story describes animal creatures as made from the ‘ground,’ also dependent on God. This creaturely dependence upon God is affirmed throughout the rest of the Christian scripture. The writer and speaker Nekeisha Alexis-Baker beautifully summarizes that the overarching witness of the Bible “testifies to the shared essence of human and nonhuman animal beings as ones who are made of dust, who return to dust, and whom God animates with a common breath.”1

Our shared beginning as mud cakes formed from this earth should remind us to live humbly with each other. We are mutually dependent on our Creator in our shared fragility.

As we live our days within God’s unfolding story, are we mindful that we are but dust? Do we live humbly with our fellow human and nonhuman creatures?

Newscasts bear daily witness to hostility and abuse between humans. Equally, it’s clear that animals generally don’t fare well at the hands of humans. Sadly, for too many wild species, we are cataloging their extinction due to loss of habitats because people and governments have failed to share the earth in the ways that First Nations and indigenous people have modeled for centuries. By magnitude, the worst cases of nonhuman animal treatment are for the sake of food production, with human laborers suffering as well.

For the past 28 years, I’ve lived in South Africa, a country I married into. Centuries of colonialism and the years of Apartheid rule entrenched violence within our dominant food system. The government used laws formed in white supremacy to work violence against People of Color by robbing them of their farmland.

Violence continues to permeate the food system. Many farm laborers are exploited with the very low wages they are paid by large, mostly white-owned farms. A few supermarkets and large food companies dominate food sales, and they make nutritious food inaccessible to many people by setting high prices. The land itself is exploited by the industrial farming methods used by large-scale farms.

The violence within the food system extends to the treatment of farmed animals. Increasingly, animals are treated as if their only worth is as meat, or for the eggs and milk they produce; whether they live decent chicken lives, or pig lives, or cow lives doesn’t factor. They are treated as units on a factory conveyor belt, not as created beings who can feel and suffer.

While the evils of Apartheid cannot be overstated, South Africa reflects the global trends for producing and distributing large amounts of food with the most efficiency, for the most convenience, at the highest profit. ‘Big Agriculture’ has replaced more localized food systems, creating wealth for a few multinational corporations. People are valued only as they serve the system, either as expendable laborers, or as consumers. Within this mix, too many people are food insecure, excluded from having enough nutritious food to sustain good health. The land is over-farmed to produce high yields. “The result is degraded and destroyed habitats, miserable animals, insecure and abused workers, unjust trade agreements, and lonely eaters.”2 Our global food systems perpetuate violence.

When it comes to meat and other animal products, the USA and other countries in the minority world have perfected factory farming efficiencies. Sadly, the rest of the world has taken their example, and now most of the world’s farmed animals are forced to live terrible lives and die terrible deaths in factory farms.

Putting the focus on animal creatures, what exactly is our human responsibility to the rest of Creation?

In Gen 1:26, God said, “Let us make human beings in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule” —or dominate —“over every living creature.” For many years I lived uncomfortably with this God-given mandate to exercise dominion over our fellow earthlings. It felt violent to me, and I could see the unbearable evidence of humankind wielding violence against the earth and environment, against animal creatures, against each other. Alas, the Hebrew word in the text —radah —does mean ‘to rule’ or ‘to dominate.’ So, we can’t simply wish away that portion of our sacred text.

I now understand that this mandate to rule wasn’t God’s sanction to abuse or exploit Creation. We mishandle the text when we focus only on the dominion directive, but not on the preceding words: “Let us make human beings in Our image, in Our likeness, so that…”

Pause for one moment and breathe in this astounding truth: God’s image is formed into every person who has and ever shall live!

We are image-bearers of the Creator of the heavens and the earth, and we carry this image so that we will reflect God’s likeness as we live. With our dominion, we are meant to represent God to God’s own Creation. This is a special responsibility that we carry as humankind, and we sow devastation when we forget Whom we represent.

Our relationships with living creatures are meant to embody the merciful, protective ways of God. Dr. Tiana Bosman, a South African Hebrew language scholar, explains that human dominion should be understood as servitude, emulating Jesus’s ways of servant leadership to bring reconciliation to the world.3 We imitate Jesus, “Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant.” (Phil 2:6,7) The scholar Carol Adams asks, “What kind of God do we as God’s representatives on earth make known through our treatment and killing of animals? If dominion is a good thing granted by God, why don’t we own up to what the dominion we assert for ourselves actually involves?”4

But we have forgotten in Whose image we are made. We have forgotten our fragility. We have stepped far from serving all Creation with humility.

Let’s be mindful of Whom we represent to the rest of Creation. Let’s carry this responsibility with holy awe, even if it means we will need to change our food sources and eating behaviors.

1. Nekeisha Alexis-Baker, “Doesn’t the Bible Say that Humans Are More Important than Animals?” in A Faith Embracing All Creatures: Commonly Asked Questions about Christian Care for Animals, eds. Tripp York and Andy Alexis-Baker (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2012), 50.↩
2. Norman Wirzba, Food and Faith: A Theology of Eating (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 12.↩
3. Dr. Tiana Bosman is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Religion and Theology at the University of the Western Cape (South Africa). These thoughts were shared with me in conversation. They came from her preparation to present the paper “Rulers or servants?: A re-reading of Psalm 8 concerning the place of mankind in the Age of the Anthropocene” at the Planetary Entanglement: Theology and the Anthropocene conference (October 2021), a collaboration between two South African and one Dutch university.↩
4. Carol J. Adams, “What About Dominion in Genesis?” in A Faith Embracing All Creatures: Commonly Asked Questions about Christian Care for Animals, eds. Tripp York and Andy Alexis-Baker (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2012), 10.↩

If God is a hen, I am a heifer

By Bianca Rati

When I was 10 years old, I received a partial scholarship to study in a private school for rich kids. As my name (Bianca) prophesied, I was a very white girl, almost albino, with short hair at the nape of my neck, gaping and crooked teeth, glasses (at a time when it was ugly to wear them), and an extroverted innocence. I experienced hostility from my classmates from the day I arrived, with my beautiful Hello Kitty backpack of which I was very proud; but I thought it was just a matter of needing to make friends. 

The most popular girl in the class had her birthday one month after the start of school. Her family had a farm in a more rural town in the countryside, where my mother was born and where I still had family members. The plans for the party included a bus that would take all the kids to the town where they would spend the night. Because my parents didn't know anyone, they didn't let me go, but I had shared with some classmates that I had family members in the town. On the Monday after returning from the party, my classmates  approached me saying, “Bianca, we had the chance to meet your relatives on the way to the farm!” Confused, I replied, "How so?" One of them, already looking at the others and laughing, replied, “Didn't you say you had family in town? We saw your relatives, the white cows, on the road. What is it like being related to cows?” I didn't quite understand why being called a cow was humiliating, but I felt humiliated. That nickname haunted me during the four years I studied at that school. Just when I thought they had forgotten, it returned. 

In my last school year I met my relatives, the cows, in another form because my family moved to a rural area due to a job opportunity for my parents. The rural colony where we were living was known for the production of milk and dairy products, especially cheese. Immediately beside our house was a pasture inhabited by a herd of dairy cows. My room was strategically next to my new neighbors. I saw them move, I heard them talk and moo as they carried on a routine of their own. Studying madly to get into college, I spent hours in my room, and my studymates were those cows. Even then, I never went to the fence to say thank you for their company. I still didn't want to be associated with the cows. 

It was in a therapy session four years later that my psychologist highlighted the link of this childhood story with cows and made me think about what this word and what this animal meant to me. From that moment, I began a journey to reconnect with cows. But it was only after two more years that I started to really get involved with the issue of farmed animal welfare. Although, I can genuinely say that living with my cow neighbors shaped and transformed me. Noticing their routine, observing their way of life and behavior, and perceiving their presence tore the veil of separation between my human experience and the farmed animal experience. Are we really that different? Or as the Bible accounts, are we fellow creatures created by and worshiping the same God? 

When I was becoming vegan, struggling to give up milk and dairy products, I discovered that cows are amazing, beyond what they produce. I found that dairy cows, like other mammals, only begin to produce milk while pregnant and are able to give milk only after they give birth. This means that heifers are constantly subjected to being impregnated outside of their will via artificial insemination. In this endless cycle, they are exploited to exhaustion. They are separated from their babies as soon as the calves are born so that the milk can be consumed by humans rather than the babies they birth. Heifer and calf, mother and child, cry and scream in despair as they are separated. At the time, I had no idea that this was the reality of my neighbors. Because my house was just next to the pasture and not the farm operations, I didn't hear the screams and cries, I didn't see the rape that was likely occurring on the property right crossing the street. But I also never asked myself what happened to them when they weren’t in the pasture. What they go through is hidden in plain sight.

Today, I think that the veil between my neighbors and me that was eventually torn was part of a dissociation that I was taught for years — an abstraction of the animal as a beloved living being, an abstraction of the animal as Creation like me. Many animal activists point to this phenomenon: we fail to connect the products we buy in markets and stores with their origin through a process of dissonance orchestrated and perpetuated by capitalism. The dissonance is so great that sometimes the food industry places images of seemingly happy animals on their packaging, causing consumers not to think about the animals’ lives or make a connection to their death. Such disconnection is required in order to produce such deceitful packages. Think about it. Incidentally, this is true of the suffering and exploitation of human and non-human animals, as well as the entire earth.

One of the typical dishes of Brazil, especially in the Southern region where I live, is “churrasco,” a type of barbecue. In this meal, various types of animal organs and body parts  are prepared in stone ovens over charcoal. One of the typical body parts included in the churrasco is the chicken heart. Whenever they were served in my family, I remember someone making the morbid joke: “And to think that each heart comes from a whole chicken!” That is, each heart means the death of a chicken. The joke was met with the slightly embarrassed laughter of the group, and it has always made me uncomfortable. I could never eat chicken hearts. Since I was very young, I refused, saying they looked like small human hearts. But today I see this familiar joke differently. Like it or not, this joke also breaks the dissonance and dissociation because for a few seconds we were all led to think about the chickens and their lives. Even if the joke didn’t lead any of my relatives to stop eating the hearts, somehow, it led us to the recognition that the chicken too had a life.

Years later, already in college, I edited a podcast with the participation of theologian Nancy Cardoso.1 She talked about the images we have of God and how they are usually male images despite the Bible itself proposing other images. As an example, she cited God as a hen that hides her chicks under her wings, present in Psalms 91:4, Matthew 23:37, and Luke 13:34. Here, I think it is important to explain a detail of the Portuguese language that is very different from English — almost all words have gender, including names of animals, things, and places. We do not have an equivalent for the pronoun “it,” traditionally there is no neutral pronoun in Portuguese. So, in Portuguese 2, cow (vaca) and chicken (galinha) are feminine words, therefore, a chicken-God is, thinking in Portuguese, also a feminine God.

Vaca (heifer) and galinha (hen) are also words used in Brazil in a derogatory way to offend people in femme bodies. They have a sex-shaming connotation, which I don't believe my classmate knew at age ten, but he already knew that word would mark me negatively. A mark of shame, a mark of a femme body that, similarly to the bodies of cows and chickens, experiences commodification. There are heavier words in the Portuguese language, swearing and profanity, but it is quite revealing that the way the culture sees these animals also aligns with the way women and girls are perceived.3

The image of a hen-God changes everything. That day when I was editing the podcast, this image helped me free myself from a heavy anguish related to the idea that God was male and possibly a reflection of patriarchal domination. This image helped me understand a God who has warm and safe wings, with a fierce look of determination when she sees danger heading toward her chicks. The image of God as a mother hen changed the way I see God, beyond any one gender and transcending human form, yet tenderly feminine and mothering.

But in the last few months, participating in the CreatureKind fellowship and having the opportunity to promote many conversations with Christians about farmed animal welfare, I have realized that there is something even deeper in the image of God as a chicken because that image is provocative and even uncomfortable. It introduces us to a God we lock in small cages at the service of our whims. Such an image makes us realize that we are the image and likeness of God who also projects herself as a chicken. This image reminds us of that lost connection, the connection that we are all Creation, and we’re all beloved creatures.

The abstraction of the human with the rest of nature is a product, mainly, of colonization and white supremacy, which stole and killed to suppress everything that was different from itself to be able to own everything. When I think about how humans today can reestablish a meaningful connection to Creation, I think of those who never lost it. When I think about what it means to understand oneself as part of Creation and fellow creatures, I remember the speeches of the Krenak indigenous people who spoke about Watu, the Rio Doce, which is a river in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais that was poisoned by the sludge of ore tailings from the Samarco company in 2016:

“It is as if we lost a person who we always lived with and liked a lot. So when we consider [Watu] as a father or mother, it is because we know that the destruction that these companies caused in Rio Doce, killed an important person within the Krenak community. It took a piece of us.”4 (Amynoare, vice chief of Uatu village)

If God is a hen, I am a heifer. This connection demonstrates a missing link of harmony,5 a missing link of coexistence, a link that needs to be reconciled. I present this reflection to summarize some of the many expressions being shared throughout ministries, like CreatureKind, that focus on the welfare of farmed animals. This ministry area does not exist without a call to reconcile the lost connection with the rest of Creation and the natural world. And to start the process of reconnecting, maybe we can start by asking ourselves: how would we treat animals, farmed and other, if we saw God in them and them in God?
1. Nancy Cardoso is a Brazilian feminist theologian and Methodist pastor. She has worked for more than two decades with the Pastoral Land Commission, a movement of churches in support of rural workers' struggle in land-related conflicts. Some of her works can be read in Portuguese and Spanish, in Ribla (Journal of Latin American Biblical Interpretation).↩

2. It is important to note that there are proposals for neutral language in Portuguese, discussions that are led especially by the non-binary trans community. This community has proposed several formats of neutral pronouns, and some parts of society (especially the LGBTQIA+ community and allies) have increasingly tried to adopt these solutions.↩

3. Carrie Hamilton, “Sex, Work, Meat: The Feminist Politics of Veganism,” Fem Rev 114, 112–129 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41305-016-0011-1. Carrie Hamilton highlights that, although commodification is something experienced by femme bodies, especially BIPOC femme bodies, we must be careful with this comparison, particularly when it comes to comparisons with sex work. As she puts it, "What marks the commonality between animal labor and human sex work is not any fundamental similarity in the category of work performed, but rather the frequent denial of the labor itself” (Hamilton, 14).↩

4. Amynoare, “Krenak - Vivos na Natureza Morta,” directed by Andrea Pilar Marranquiel, November 22, 2017, documentary, 13:07, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ng52AN3bmI.↩

5. Randy S. Woodley, Shalom and the Community of Creation: An Indigenous Vision (Grand Rapids & Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2012).↩