Creation Care - “Hope for Creation” with Ellen Davis
Shownotes:
God’s creation is a direct reflection of God’s glory, and Christians are called to be faithful stewards of the earth. While global issues of climate and environment can seem out of reach, our local communities give us space to learn and take action in small and large ways. How can we partner with our creator to build a better, more sustainable living environment? What simple, practical changes can we make to responsibly care for our local communities and our world?
Chris and Eddie are joined by Ellen F. Davis, professor at Duke Divinity School and author of Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible. An Old Testament scholar with deep wisdom about our ecological crisis, Davis views the land we’ve inherited as kin and a covenant partner. She speaks to our call to serve and preserve the land out of honor and love for what God has given us. Davis challenges us to hold onto a hope that is not just a passive, sunny optimism, but a collective vision of goodness and wholeness driven by human creativity and agency.
Series Info:
God’s creation is a direct reflection of God’s glory, and Christians are called to be faithful stewards of the earth. While global issues of climate and environment can seem out of reach, our local communities give us space to learn and take action in small and large ways. How can we partner with our creator to build a better, more sustainable living environment? What simple, practical changes can we make to responsibly care for our local communities and our world?
In this series, we will discuss the relationship between humanity and creation with leaders in agriculture, government, and the church. These guests equip us with the knowledge we need to honor God through creation care. Join us as we seek to make environmental issues less intimidating and more inviting, rooted in love for God’s very good creation and honor for the image of God woven throughout it all.
Resources:
Learn more about Ellen Davis here:
https://divinity.duke.edu/faculty/ellen-davis
Order Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible here
Check out all books by Ellen Davis here
Full Transcript:
Chris McAlilly 0:00
I'm Chris McAlilly.
Eddie Rester 0:02
And I'm Eddie Rester. Welcome to The Weight.
Chris McAlilly 0:04
Today we're talking to Ellen Davis, who's professor of Bible and Practical Theology at Duke Divinity School. And we're talking about creation care and the wisdom of the Holy Scriptures.
Eddie Rester 0:18
What what Ellen Davis brings to this conversation is a deep love and wisdom and really care of the Old Testament. When I was talking with her, I was transported back to my divinity school days where you had professors who didn't just know scripture but could express it and teach it in such a way that was exciting and inviting. And that's what my experience of her today was.
Chris McAlilly 0:46
I think that if you're interested in the larger questions around climate change or ecology, and you're looking for resources for how you can engage it perhaps from a new and imaginative way, Ellen's gonna give you way into some of the, you know, the depth of Christian scripture as a real resource.
Eddie Rester 1:09
And she does it from a perspective of someone who is raised really in the city. But through her time in Jerusalem, she spent time in Israel--she dropped that she had her junior year of college when she was 18 years old, which means she's pretty smart, I guess. I wasn't at my junior year of college when I was 18 years old--but then reflecting on our home state of California and other experiences and conversations she's had with farmers along the way of just how she sees the Old Testament as giving us a vision of how we care for the land.
Chris McAlilly 1:46
Yeah, and it's a conversation that leads in the direction of hope, but it also points towards human agency, human responsibility and things that we can do.
Eddie Rester 1:59
And what she offers to, at least to me, was a rereading of the prophets who knew the land and lived in the land of Israel, and were rooted in the land and how much that plays a part in understanding of Covenant, and life and care. There were just a lot of moments in the conversations today that I thought were just illuminating. Chris, what for you was maybe the most illuminating moment for you in the conversation?
Chris McAlilly 2:28
When I interact with a scholar of her caliber, and then someone who has just immersed their live life and reading the scriptures, it just makes the Bible come alive for me in a way that sometimes it can go stale, you know, and so I am now quite interested in taking another deep dive into the prophecy of the Old Testament, the prophetic literature as a way of offering both judgment and hope and pointing us to God's way of ordering the world as a way of finding our rhythm and pattern and habit of life today, but also, perhaps, kind of offering me a way to kind of critique or to do some self examination about some of the habits and patterns of my life and the life that we enjoy together.
Eddie Rester 3:22
If you love scripture, this is a great episode for you. If you're not sure what to think about scripture, or how scripture even applies to much of anything in this world, I think it's also a great episode for you because you get to hear the scriptures opened maybe in a different way. So share this episode, listen to it, let us know what you think as we close out this series on creation care.
Chris McAlilly 3:44
Yeah, and go back and listen to the other episodes. This has been a great series. And there's a good arc and a lot of wonderful conversations and a lot of points of entry, if you care about creation and the world around us. So we're grateful that you've been with us and we'll see you next time on The Weight.
Chris McAlilly 4:02
[INTRO] We started this podcast out of frustration with the tone of American Christianity.
Eddie Rester 4:09
There are some topics too heavy for sermons and sound bites.
Chris McAlilly 4:12
We wanted to create a space with a bit more recognition of the difficulty, nuance, and complexity of cultural issues.
Eddie Rester 4:19
If you've given up on the church, we want to give you a place to encounter a fresh perspective on the wisdom of the Christian tradition in our conversations about politics, race, sexuality, art, and mental health.
Chris McAlilly 4:32
If you're a Christian seeking a better way to talk about the important issues of the day, with more humility, charity, and intellectual honesty that grapples with Scripture and the church's tradition in a way that doesn't dismiss people out of hand. You're in the right place.
Eddie Rester 4:47
Welcome to The Weight. [END INTRO]
Chris McAlilly 4:50
Well, we're here today with Ellen Davis to end our Creation Care series. Ellen, thank you so much for taking the time to be with us.
Ellen Davis 4:59
It's my pleasure, Chris. Thank you.
Chris McAlilly 5:02
We have been reading, I've been reading your work and following your the trajectory of your scholarship for a number of years. But I wonder if you would talk a little bit about what drew you to I guess to become a biblical scholar?
Ellen Davis 5:17
Yes, from early adolescence, I oriented to the ancient world, taking Latin through high school. And then, when I was 18, I went to Jerusalem. It was my junior year in college. I spent a year at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. It was pretty much a lark. And I was 18. I thought about it probably for 10 minutes seriously, before I committed myself to it. And, it was one of those years of my life that looking back, you realize it changed everything. Although it was 13 or 14 years before I realized that I would do this with my adult life.
Ellen Davis 6:15
So if you look at my resume, it looks as though I knew what I was going to do when I was 18. But that's not true. And actually becoming a biblical scholar was a surprise. I'm a classic case of having suddenly recognized that I was being called by something or someone beyond myself. My spiritual director at that time was the prioress of an Anglo Catholic convent in Oxford. And she asked me what I was going to do with the rest of my life. At this point, I was a little past 30. And in a completely unpremeditated way, I said, I think I need to teach, preach, and exercise a pastoral ministry. She said that sounds right, how are you going to do that? And I said, I think I need to get a doctorate in Old Testament. And that's what I did. But up until that point, I assumed I would do what I had been doing, which was continuing work in religious nonprofit.
Eddie Rester 7:29
I'd love to hear a little bit more about what drew you to the Old Testament. What kind of sparked your love for teaching and reading and teaching others to read the Old Testament?
Ellen Davis 7:46
What happened to me in Jerusalem, and then at a later time in my life, maybe two years later, I was living on Kibbutz in Israel. I was speaking Hebrew. And so it was the language which I find extremely beautiful and compelling, quite frankly, in a way that I don't find Greek and Latin, not to the same degree. So it's partly the language. And the other thing that happened that you, living in Jerusalem, is that I began to know the Bible.
Ellen Davis 8:36
And you need to understand I'm a cradle Episcopalian. So I would say that I grew up knowing the Book of Common Prayer in my bones and largely by heart. I did not grow up knowing the Bible the same way. So when I began to really know the Bible, it was in the context of living in the land in which it was written and beginning to speak the language in which it was written. And all of that spoke to me in a very deep way.
Eddie Rester 9:12
And then through your career, you've really moved to, I think, what you call an agrarian perspective and agrarian reading of the Old Testament. How did you make that move? And what does that mean for you in looking at the Bible?
Ellen Davis 9:29
About 20 years after the time, the first time I'm speaking to you about, by then I was teaching at Yale Divinity School, so living in Connecticut, a very urbanized part of this country. And I made a trip back to California to visit my parents. And someone, a friend took me for a drive in the wine country; my parents lived in that area. But a part of the wine country I had not seen, probably since my childhood. And I was shocked at how much it had changed. And I was about 40 years old at that time.
Ellen Davis 10:25
I remember the thought forming in my mind, if my home state has changed this much in the somewhat less than four decades of my active memory, and if I compare that to what I knew of the land of Israel over something like four millennia, I realized we don't have for millennia ahead of us. And that was really sobering. And it came again. I was about 40, so sort of midlife... I wouldn't call it a midlife crisis, but it was a midlife recognition. And so I decided when I returned to New Haven that I would start teaching a course in what I call the biblical ecology of land, a biblical theology of land.
Ellen Davis 11:32
And when I started that, I thought that I was going to have to be highly selective in choosing texts that would illuminate aspects of well being of land. I could not have been more wrong. I could have opened the Bible at random, certainly the Old Testament, almost at random, and started in any chapter. And the issues with adding land, climate, water, care or neglect of land, all of those would have come up, oppression of land holders, small farmers. And so I recognize that this is something that I probably was going to be spending a lot of time on. And I needed to learn more about it.
Ellen Davis 12:35
So I began connecting right about that time, Wes Jackson, who is the founder of the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas came and gave a lecture at Yale. And he talked about agriculture and the way we had mispracticed agriculture over millennia. And when somebody speaks in terms of millennia, it gets my attention. So I asked him, I had a sabbatical coming up, I asked if I could come to the Land Institute in Kansas. And I did, and things began to fall into place for me. And to my surprise, the more I talked to farmers, and that circle pretty quickly expanded to include Norman Wirzba, Wendell Berry, along with Wes Jackson, and those students and younger people. The more I talked to them, the more the pieces seemed to cohere with a biblical perspective.
Chris McAlilly 13:53
Over the course of the series of conversations about creation care, we've talked about climate change from various perspectives. I think it's so fascinating that your way into this conversation was by way of a deep dive into the agrarian dimensions of the Old Testament, then its preoccupation with the health and well being of the land. I wonder for folks who may not be as familiar with the resources of the Bible, why should you know we in general, not just Christians, but why do you think it's helpful to give weight to the resources of the Bible in the conversation about climate change, if folks are concerned about it?
Eddie Rester 14:40
in a phrase, because the Bible is insightful on these matters. I remember on that first trip to the Land Institute, Wes Jackson said to me, why does the Bible always get it right about land? And this is someone whose life is about making agriculture work like an ecosystem. So his perception is that the Bible gets it right about land. I didn't know enough about agriculture, land to know that the Bible always gets it right. Wendell Berry says, in order to be an agrarian, you need to know what it is to have just a little land. You need to know what it is to have just a little land. And I would add to that, and you need to be able to imagine what it would be like to lose the little that you have. Either to lose the land by having it taken away from you by those more powerful than you or for the land to lose its fertility.
Ellen Davis 16:06
And the Land of Israel now, I would say in response to Wes, and I have said to him, that the Bible as we have it could not have been written in Egypt, because they had too big a margin for error. Similarly, Mesopotamia. Similarly, North America. You know, all these, certainly Egypt and North America, we measured topsoil in feet. In the uplands of Canaan and Israel and Judah, topsoil is measured in inches, not feet. And so it was very easy for them to imagine losing the fertility of the land. This is also a region of the world in which four out of 10 years of drought years, and this was before climate change.
Ellen Davis 17:10
So the biblical writers, they have their eyes on the well-being of the land all the time, and they believe that God has God's eyes on the well-being of the land all the time. And just to maybe finish this point, what I find so compelling now is that the biblical writers assume a link between the land losing its fertility, between climate disaster, especially drought, they assume a link between what we would call those natural disasters and human sin. Drought is personal for the biblical writers. It's judgment on their actions, human actions in that land. A generation ago that might have seemed fanciful to us, it might have seemed old fashioned. It doesn't seem that way now. We can easily make a connection between climate disaster and human sin. If you've used at least, grievous human selfishness and error if you don't like the word "sin." So I think the Bible sort of goes straight to the heart of that connection.
Eddie Rester 18:48
I love that perspective you just offered. I've never thought of it in that way, just the plenty in terms of just the soil in Egypt, which the Israelites would have had memory of, but also for us in the United States throughout history. I got to go to Israel some 20 years ago, and the places you know, Galilee, parts of the Galilee were lush, pockets of the southern part of the country were lush, but there was great disparity between where you could grow things and where you could not grow things. It was very clear.
Eddie Rester 19:27
And as you traveled across the land, as we think a little bit more about the Bible, one of the things that you wrote is that for us in our day and time, the Bible offers us vision and principles, not solutions. I think you wrote, "An agrarian reading of the Bible is not an exercise in nostalgia." So what are some of those visions and principles that it offers to us, this you know, two thousand years later, two thousand plus years later?
Eddie Rester 20:02
I would say the primary one is that land is not just an it. It's not just a thing on which we perform operations, so to speak. And to give you an example of that, in the second chapter of the Bible, Genesis two, verse 15, the Lord God formed the human being, and put him in the garden, [SPEAKS HEBREW]. That is often translated, just checking the text as I'm talking to you. Yeah. That's often translated, "to till it and to tend it." And those are sort of typical farming words. What's misleading about that translation is that the two words that occur in this verse, neither one of them is a farming or gardening word. They're both used hundreds of times in the Bible. And the most common context in which those two words are used in the first one, which, as I say, is often translated "to till it," but it actually means "to work or to serve." And it's the words that's used for serving God.
Ellen Davis 21:58
So what if you translate that the Lord God put the human being in the Garden of Eden to serve it? And the second word is "shamar." It means "to keep, to preserve." "Tend" is not, is an infrequent use of it, because usually the word "keep," "preserve" refers to keeping the statutes, the ordinances, the teaching of God. So what if you translated that the Lord God set the human in the Garden of Eden to serve it and to preserve it? Or to serve it and to keep it? To serve it and protect it? Even "to serve it and observe it," like you observe the commandments? That sounds really different. And then...
Eddie Rester 22:16
It's radically different.
Ellen Davis 23:09
And then you begin to realize that from a biblical perspective, land is not an "it." It's a partner. It comes first, because remember, the human being in chapter two, a few verses earlier in Genesis, the human being is formed. Adam from adamah, human from humerus. And so the land is kin. And in Leviticus, God speaks about, God is speaking about covenant. And God says, "I will remember my covenant with Jacob. And yes, I will remember my covenant with Isaac. And yes, I will remember my covenant with Abraham. And the land, I will remember." And what that suggests is that land is a covenant partner. And so our relationship with God is not a two-way relationship. It's a three-way relationship.
Chris McAlilly 24:22
I think that this is kind of just a demonstration of the way in which the Bible can be insightful and can offer fresh vision in the conversation today. But I want to press a little bit more on what you were talking about related to Berry's sense that to become an agrarian one must have land and imagine losing it. One of the lenses that I know that you've been exploring and thinking through with your students is the lens of exile. And I wonder if you could talk a bit more about how the lens of exile can help us think today about where we currently stand in the midst of the world and at this moment in history.
Eddie Rester 25:17
I will. But I also want to go back for I don't want to misquote Wendell Berry, what he says is, "In order to be an agrarian, one must know what know what it is to have just a little land." And so he's not speaking about possession in the first instance, but about a kind of awareness of being in relationship with land. And actually, I think that is apt for the Bible, because the Bible is deeply marred, as you have suggested, with the, you might say, the scars of exile. I think that very much of the Old Testament, as we know it, was put into the form that we know, in the period of the Babylonian Exile, when Israel had lost its land in subsequent waves, to the two great empires of Assyria and Babylon.
Ellen Davis 26:41
And the New Testament, much of it is written after the loss of the temple, and the destruction of Jerusalem. And First Peter, for instance, speaks to the exiles in Asia Minor. So there's a kind of exile consciousness that runs through the whole Bible, you might say, starting in Genesis when the humans are booted out of Eden, where they were meant to serve it and preserve it.
Ellen Davis 27:20
And so in the course that I have just finished teaching with my colleague, Jerusha Neal, a professor of homiletics and preaching the Bible in the light of climate change. When we started planning that class, Dr. Neal said to me, I think it was our first meeting, she said, "Where would you locate us on a biblical map," speaking metaphorically, a biblical map. And without having to think about it, I said in exile. Because exile is about being, living on the other side of what was previously unthinkable. Exile in the Bible is living on the other side of the thing that was never supposed to happen, and has happened: the destruction of Jerusalem. God's people, as Israelites understand themselves, booted out of the land that God gave to them when they entered it as refugees, as the biblical narrative goes.
Ellen Davis 29:03
And so we now are living on the other side of the thing that was never supposed to happen, which is that humans could actually change the climate of our planet for the worse. And just as the Israelites had to rethink everything they thought they understood, in light of the destruction of Jerusalem, the loss of the temple, the loss of the kingship, the throne of David, they had to rethink all of their religious traditions in light of those disasters. And I think that's where we are now.
Ellen Davis 29:55
If you are a person of some religious conviction and you're not willing to give up on God, and if you're trying to look at the world realistically, and you're not willing to give up on the world as it is, then what else can you do, but rethink what you have previously thought and believed in light of where we are now? And find a way to move forward in faith, hope, love. And that, I think, is the challenge that the Bible presents us with, and helps us to address.
Eddie Rester 30:48
You know, I'm sitting here thinking about exile and what you said just a couple of minutes ago that when God rewrites the covenant with with Jacob and Isaac and Abraham and the land, you know, when you add that layer to when they moved to exile, it wasn't just this moment where they realized their covenant with God had been broken, but that the loss of the land was just as much a part of that as anything else. And you know, when we get to Jeremiah, and Jeremiah is saying, live, make friends, build houses, have kids in this not your land. It really is this great rethinking. And I think we missed that in our day and time. We're so removed from that moment that we miss how dramatic that was for the people.
Eddie Rester 31:41
There's a sermon you preached recently at Duke Chapel, where you use Micah in this conversation. I know that other times, you've talked a lot about Jeremiah, you've talked Isaiah as lenses through this. But what I found interesting about your sermon with Micah is that you pointed it right in the middle of the Minor Prophets, and it really breaks to either side. And then Micah talks about judgment. But then he also jumps back to hope as well. What is Micah offer to us in this moment in terms of hope and change?
Ellen Davis 32:18
I would say that Micah certainly, but the prophets as a whole, each of the prophetic books--and the prophetic books are anthologies of prophetic sayings. So I think that all of them have been carefully edited to read the way that we read them. I don't mean to say that the words are not genuine. They are. But these are crafted collections of prophetic sayings from the various prophets. And something that is true of virtually every prophetic book is that they juxtapose despair, condemnation of human sin, all our calls of doom, that's juxtaposed with visions of hope and restoration. And those two, often you're sort of toggling back and forth between those two, as though either one were possible. Both are possible. And we have a choice to make. And I think that's what Micah is telling us.
Ellen Davis 33:56
As you pointed out, and this was something, I preached that sermon just a few days ago, actually. And as I was working on it, I was quite surprised to find that two visions of Jerusalem, and Jerusalem for the prophets, including Jesus, is the geophysical and the spiritual center of the world. Two visions of Jerusalem: One Jerusalem plowed like a field, a very agrarian image. Jerusalem in ruins, destroyed by an enemy army. That's chapter three of Micah. And then beginning in chapter four, first verse, you have the picture that we also have in the book of Isaiah of Jerusalem lifted up above all the mountains as the highest of the mountains and all of the nations is streaming to Jerusalem, to learn the ways of the Lord. "And they will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks," again, very agrarian images.
Ellen Davis 35:25
That juxtaposition between those two visions comes, as you said, exactly in the middle of the book of the twelve minor prophets. The ancient scribes always tell you when you're in the middle of a book, and it's right there. I think that's quite deliberate to say these two possibilities for the future of Jerusalem, the future of the land, the future of the world. We are hanging in... The future hangs in the balance between those two. And the prophets are saying to us, there is genuine hope, but it involves profound change. Because right now the direction we are headed is Jerusalem plowed like a field and the Temple Mount will be a wooded height, just say uninhabited.
Eddie Rester 36:33
And so the I think what Micah and the other prophets are advising us is that hope is not the same as optimism. Hope is not assuming that if we just kind of keep going along, God will work it out for us.
Eddie Rester 37:10
One of the things that I find most important about the Bible in shaping and reshaping our imagination is that the Bible does not assume that the future will look like the present or the past. The Bible, throughout, recognizes that things can and likely will change profoundly. And they can change for much, much worse.
Chris McAlilly 37:46
Yeah, I think one of the things that strikes me about the conversation around climate change, and particularly among those who have religious convictions, and even folks that we've talked to you, over the last several weeks... I think about one of the threads of the conversation, it's about the possibilities and limitations of human agency and creativity and innovation and choice to solve problems related to climate change. And it seems to me that both there is a sense in which what the Bible, the biblical witness is doing is offering us insight and vision to shape and reshape our imagination, but it's also drawing our attention back to what God is doing in the midst of all of this. And I wonder if you could... There are a number of different places that we could take the conversation, but I guess what is it that you see at the at the end of all human action or agency or creativity? What is it that you see God continually doing for Israel?
Eddie Rester 38:57
Israel taking humanity seriously as agents, I'm not entirely able to follow up on your phrase "at the end of all human action." Because I don't think the Bible takes us beyond the end of human interaction with God. You know, what is my understanding of whatever constitutes eternal life is continued interaction with God. And so that's the concept I can't quite embrace. However, as my dear colleague, Richard Hays, New Testament scholar, used to say about the Bible, "it's about God, stupid."
Ellen Davis 40:14
The Bible is throughout wholly theocentric. So it is in the first instance about God. And you earlier cited the notion of God's judgment, the Hebrew word "mishpat," which we translate "judgment." In the Old Testament, we often translate it judgment, but equally, we often translate it justice. But what the word "mishpat" means is God's way of ordering the world. And so it's God's modus operandi, you might say. When God's modus operandi comes into action with humans, that might look like justice. It might look like judgment, depending upon how much we've been paying attention to God's way of ordering the world.
Chris McAlilly 41:41
So yeah, no, that's really helpful. It's a really helpful way of framing it, because I do think that it assumes both, you know, I mean... I guess the way I was kind of framing it was to say, it was to express a bit of pessimism about the capacity of human agency to make any difference at all, and ultimately, if God has acted to liberate in the past, that God's acts of liberation, were somehow devoid of human cooperation. But I that's just not the way the story of Exodus is written, and it requires God's acts of liberation. And in Exodus require the participation and the interaction of human agents, Moses, Aaron, and otherwise. And I think that that's helpful, because it does give us something to do, even as the horizon of our hope extends beyond kind of whatever technological solution might be available to solve the climate problem, as if that's the only way of framing it, if you have that horizon of there is a way that God desires the world to be ordered. It just opens up the capacity to, I guess, engage in a contemplative mode, in a way of imagining the order of things that would allow you to resist or to adopt a kind of holistic way of life. Where do you see Christians doing that well right now or faithfully?
Ellen Davis 43:27
I'm going to start where I am. So that's Duke Divinity School. And, as I've mentioned, I just finished a couple of months ago teaching a class on preaching in light of climate change, biblical preaching in light of climate change. Frankly, I was astonished at how well my students did in engaging that issue deeply. Most of them, probably most of--it was a class of something over 30 people. Most of those people took climate change as a reality but didn't know very much about it when they came into the class. Most of them had never heard anybody preach a sermon on climate change. Most of them did not know any Christian leaders who would engage in this as an issue. And so we were starting from scratch in some ways. And they were not all, working, living in, worshipping in settings in which this would be welcomed as a way of interpreting the Bible.
Ellen Davis 45:03
But all of them sort of took a deep dive in and did, in my view, astonishingly good work that was really instructive to me. And I mentioned to you earlier that when I started teaching in the area of a biblical theology of land, I found virtually every passage was something I could engage from that perspective. They discovered the same thing about climate change. So that's just one very local example of people starting out their professional careers in ministry in a different place than they thought they were going to be maybe even just a few years ago, and taking that responsibility, shouldering that responsibility. And I don't have much doubt that most of them will not just do that kind of work for a class, but will do it in some way going forward.
Ellen Davis 46:11
I look at churches that are now using their parking lots to for farmers markets, so that farmers can sell their produce without having to pay, you know, a fairly hefty licensing fee for a farmers market. I have former students engaged in a variety of ministries that have to do with food and food security. I met somebody at the sermon I preached at Duke Chapel on Sunday. Afterwards, three people came up to me and said, we are dieticians. And we're working on food security in different states. They were from the Midwest, Virginia, this area. That's not what dieticians were worrying about when I was a kid, you know. And they said, we're so glad you spoke about this. It helps us think about our work, although none of them is working in a religious setting. But they're concerned about food, and the Bible is concerned about food.
Ellen Davis 47:38
I could go on multiplying examples, and all of those are very local. But I think that's that's where the change is going to happen. We're not going to find a silver bullet. There's not going to be a single big tech solution that reverses this problem. There are going to be millions upon millions of little local ways of addressing this problem. And that's where my hope rests.
Eddie Rester 48:18
I think that's a great place for us to land today. You talked about the prophets earlier. I thought about Dr. Mickey Efird who is at Duke when I was there who passed away a few months ago. And one of the things that he taught us about the prophets was that there was this big word "if" in the prophets. It pointed to human agency, the ability of humans to make choices that were different than the choices that had been made before. And I think what you're saying there is that it's incumbent upon us just to think about the creative ways that we can begin to make those choices that lead us toward hope. And I just appreciate your word and leading us there. If listeners are interested in some of your writing, I know a little over a decade ago, you wrote a book called "Scripture, Culture and Agriculture," which may be a good starting point as well. There are other resources today that you might point folks to.
Ellen Davis 49:20
We've spoken a lot about prophets. And I have a book that was written a little bit after 'Scripture, Culture and Agriculture" called "Biblical Prophecy: Perspectives on Christian Theology, Discipleship and Ministry." It deals with a lot of the things that we've been talking about today in various ways. And more recently, I've published a book of sermons that treats most books of the Bible, "Preaching the Luminous Word." And then finally, I've just recently published "Opening Israel's Scriptures," which is a reading through short essays of, again, most books of the Bible. And in all of those there are echoes of what we've been discussing today.
Eddie Rester 50:15
We're grateful for your time today. Thank you for spending some time with us.
Ellen Davis 50:20
Thank you very much.
Eddie Rester 50:21
[OUTRO] Thank you for listening to this episode of The Weight.
Chris McAlilly 50:25
If you liked what you heard today, feel free to share the podcast with other people that are in your network. Leave us a review. That's always really helpful. Subscribe, and you can follow us on our social media channels.
Eddie Rester 50:37
If you have any suggestions or guests you'd like us to interview or anything you'd like to share with us. you can send us an email at info@theweightpodcast.com. [END OUTRO]