August Publishers Newsletter 2025
ida decesaris
Dear Friends,
Following last year’s publication of her bestselling Vessels of Love: Prayers and Poems for the Later Years of Life, Joyce Rupp has now followed with a companion volume, The Years of Ripening: Reflections on Aging in the Later Years. These reflections focus on personal transformation, the wonder and goodness of our hidden self, how the qualities of our personhood have been expressed, and in what ways we can claim ever more of the truest reality of our inner being. Sr. Kathleen Deignan writes, “In the full maturing of her own gift of soul-care for so many, Joyce Rupp now accompanies and supports us with her ‘weathered wisdom’ to brave our fields ready for harvest, to taste at last the fruit of a spirit ripened by transformation and readied for transition.”
Jesus said, “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.” Yet the Christian tradition has often posited that in a “fallen world” this abundant life is to be found only in heaven. In his new book, A Theology of Flourishing: The Fullness of Life for All Creation, Paul J. Schutz takes a different approach, positing that “God creates a world in which all creatures are made to flourish in the fullness of life, each according to its own kind.” What would it look like, he asks, if flourishing was the starting point for theology and Christian practice, enabling us to “experience creation and everything therein as made for abundant life and to act in faith on behalf of the flourishing of all things”?
But what does it mean to promote the flourishing of all creation in a world threatened by climate change and environmental destruction? That is the theme of Grace Ji-Sun Kim’s Earthbound: God at the Intersection of Climate and Justice. Patriarchal conceptions of God “have been used to legitimize human dominance over other creatures and structures of dominance within human community. . . Doing theology that takes climate justice seriously can help prevent further climate crises and heal our hurting world.” That requires a new experience of God “as active with us, moving us to work for justice and helping us to heal the earth.”
Examples of that healing work are explored in Sacred Resistance: Eco-Activism and the Rise of New Spiritual Communities, edited by Mark Clatterbuck. In five case studies of spiritually-based eco-activism, the authors—all leaders in these struggles—describe efforts that joined Indigenous people, Catholic Sisters, Quakers, and other people of faith in mounting campaigns to protect the earth, its waters, and communities whose health and well-being are threatened by rapacious interests.
Every day we see evidence, and the consequences, of human indifference to “the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.” But God hears and calls us to choose life--life in abundance.
Peace,
Robert Ellsberg
Publisher