INTERVIEW
“ Our relationship to the rest of creation is truly spiritual—it’s about our most fundamental way of being in the world.”
ND: Can you tell us more about your “ecological conversion”?
Anna: I certainly didn’t have the language for it at the time. Saint John Paul II coined the term “ecological conversion,” and Pope Francis quotes him in Laudato Si’. Te term gets at the idea that the climate crisis is an outgrowth of the way that we understand ourselves to be human, in relation to each other and to God. Our relationship to the rest of creation is truly spiritual— it’s about our most fundamental way of being in the world—and shifting something that fundamental will take something like conversion. Prior to my time at
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that intentional Catholic community in Appalachia, I was familiar with climate change and thought it was quite scary. Even though I had learned about climate change in high school as something that would affect my children’s generation and not mine, it still felt cataclysmic, and there was a lot that we had to say “no” to. Bethlehem Farm was the first place where I understood that there were things we could say “yes” to. We could say “yes” to a different way of being in community. I could feel more at home, more of a sense of belonging, living into a different way of being human that revolves around cornerstones like (in the case of Bethlehem Farm) service, simplicity, community, and prayer. Tese kinds of alternative values are closer to the values that we as a society need to espouse if we want to move toward a sustainable and generative way of being.
ND: Why should we as Catholics be concerned about climate change?
Anna: On a most fundamental level, climate change already impacts all of us as human beings. For example, here on the West Coast last year, there was a heat
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