Radical Kinship : a Christian Ecospirituality

Rachel Wheeler is a teacher at the University of Portland in Oregon. She preaches within her faith community, teaches and engages with her students.

Week by week she worships and creates liturgies at St Andrew’s Catholic Church and the Sophia Christi Catholic Community. She writes about Christian Spirituality and Radical Kinship. Her book is structured and ordered to describe kinship identity, kinship experience, kinship practice, sacred kinship contemplation, kinship loss, kinship love and kinship vocation. All of the dimensions of kinship with the human and the more than human are explored.

Wheeler recognises that our generations are living at a time when climate change, global warming, biodiversity loss and the toxification of water, air and soil put our planet at risk. As humans, we face the possibility of not surviving while the planet we share with other species may continue without us.

The volume recognises the troubling dimensions of Christianity in the global crisis and affirms our kinship with the diversity of species. The author celebrates our creaturely companionship with all of God’s beloved. She draws on the Bible, on the classics of the Christian and the more-than-Christian traditions - including Thomas Berry, Leah Penniman, Lisa Dunhill and Rachel Carson.

Thomas Merton has introduced her to early Christian desert traditions and she draws widely and deeply on these. Ecological sources expand her thinking and imagining, and she has a strong affinity with Pope Francis nd the creation care work which he champions. In all of her thinking, and acting, and writing, she moves between classroom, sanctuary, library and the outdoors – beaches, mountains, forests and niches in the urban environment.

Theology and praxis, contemplation and imagination are linked. Two examples can be highlighted. Spiritual directors and spiritual accompaniers will enjoy the possibilities of work in the outdoors described in chapter two. Those who live in cities and regularly travel for recreation in wild places outside the city will need to face up to the urban rewilding challenges in chapter six.   

Alongside this reviewer’s delight with Radical Kinship, there is a caution. If you love short, powerful words and direct prose, you may find the substantial chapters daunting. If you enjoy writers who use new and complex words, you are in for an adventurous read.