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03
Earth’s stewards
Mar 11, 2008In a heartening development, 60 religious leaders (representing a variety of Christian denominations and the Jewish faith) presented Gov. Tim Kaine a letter yesterday asking him to oppose the Dominion Virginia Power plant proposed for Virginia City in Wise County.
The Richmond Times-Dispatch reports:
Roughly 60 Virginia religious leaders and scholars have asked Gov. Timothy M. Kaine to oppose Dominion Virginia Power’s plans for a coal-burning power plant in Wise County.
The proposed power plant will release an unacceptable amount of climate-changing greenhouse gases and will encourage more destructive strip mining in Virginia’s mountains, they said in a letter to Kaine.
“We do not want our energy to come from these immoral and destructive practices,” the authors wrote.
The Times-Dispatch article captures the thrust of the religious argument against the plant - namely that it violates the Judeo-Christian belief that we are stewards of creation:
Rabbi Ben Romer of Congregation Or Ami in Richmond said people have a moral and ethical responsibility to be good stewards of the Earth. Romer, a West Virginia native, said one only had to drive through that state to witness the destruction caused by mining.
People can find solutions to the problems facing the Earth, but they may not necessarily be the cheapest solutions, Romer said. The authors of the letter to Kaine said cleaner air and water would result by filling the demand for energy through conservation, efficiency and clean energy sources such as wind, solar and sustainable biomass fuels.
Read the full text of the letter here.
Christians believe that faith can move mountains. Perhaps it can save them as well.
Posted by Andrea Hopkins Appropriate response or overreaction?
Mar 11, 2008The University of Virginia at Wise has stirred a bit of a controversy with its expulsion of student Steve Barber over a fictional essay for a creative writing class. Not only did the essay get Barber kicked out of school, but it landed him a psychiatric evaluation and cost him his guns and his concealed weapons permit.
You can read the entire story by Michael Owens and Kathy Still here.
Did the school and prosecutors (who went to court to take Barber’s gun permit) make the right call? Where is the line between sensible precautions and punishing thought or speech? As a society, we’ve crossed that line in the past (some of the post 9/11 terrorist scares and the public school zero tolerance policies adopted after the Columbine killings come to mind).
Where would you draw the line?
