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Shilpita Mathews is a Research Assistant at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and completing a MSc in Environmental Economics and Climate Change at the London School of Economics. She is also a Climate Correspondent at Youth Ki Awaaz, an Indian youth media platform and a member of the new Young Christian Climate Network, a community of young Christians in the UK taking climate action. She also serves in the student ministry of her home church, All Souls Langham Place in central London.

4th August 2020 | Shilpita Mathews | 6 comments

Can a Christian be a climate activist?

Shouldn’t poverty alleviation be the biggest global priority? Isn’t the world going to end anyway? Are climate activists trying to play God? These are all questions raised by well-intending individuals, who may not view climate change as a high risk. By addressing these questions, we can argue that Christians, and members of all faith systems, can play a key role in leading climate action.

Categories: Facing the Future
Tags: climate change poverty priorities
30th June 2020 | Ruth Padilla DeBorst | 8 comments

Community and just conviviality

The love of stuff justifies consuming people in the name of production, progress, and the maintenance of privilege. It also justifies the voracious plunder of our planet with no regard for the delicately balanced web of life, its most vulnerable members, or for the living conditions of future generations. And it eats away at our very soul.

Categories: Reflections
Tags: community consumerism Costa Rica
2nd June 2020 | Dave Bookless | 2 comments

Please Build Back Better!

Our mobility, freedom and security put on hold… Our health and our lives threatened… Our wealth plummeted… Our temples of consumerism closed. All because of an almost invisible virus. Amidst very real fear and grief, this gives us an opportunity to rethink ‘flourishing’, and how our economic systems can be regenerative and restorative rather than unstable, unjust, and unsustainable.

Categories: Reflections
Tags: COVID-19 growth shalom
4th May 2020 | Miriam Yeo | 2 comments

Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) and Kiasu

There’s a phrase in Singapore, where I grew up, which has come to describe an aspect of our national psyche – kiasu. The word has come to mean a fear of losing out. Being kiasu is rooted in a deep insecurity, a state of being which isn’t unique to Singapore. We are deceived by a heart-breaking lie: that God has not given us all we need to thrive.

Categories: Facing the Future
Tags: consumerism
20th March 2020 | Dave Bookless | 6 comments

What virus are you spreading?

As the COVID-19 coronavirus makes its relentless way across the world, it is not the only thing that is going viral. Fear, panic-buying, stock-market slumps, and fake news stories are also infectiously spreading like viruses, making the situation so much worse. In this context, I want to ask two key questions.

Categories: Reflections
Tags: COVID-19 faith fear hope love
29th February 2020 | Rachel Mander | 0 comments

Facing the Future: Perspective

A friend this week asked me why I love the sky so much (‘I do mean that question genuinely’, they said). It gave me pause because I hadn’t considered my love of the sky to be overly notable. I also hadn’t actually ever given thought to the reasons why I do, in fact, love the sky.

Categories: Facing the Future
Tags: future Psalms sky
31st January 2020 | Caroline Pomeroy | 2 comments

Love hurts

A friend of mine who has a brother living in Australia recently took the difficult decision never to fly to Australia again. ‘Love hurts’, she commented ruefully. Others will make different choices, for different reasons, but choose we must.

Categories: Reflections
Tags: climate change Climate Stewards UK
31st December 2019 | Dave Bookless | 4 comments

A harrowing time

It’s not a word I used much previously, but ‘harrowing’ sums up the experience of the last weeks and months. To my mind it has connotations of deep emotional scarring and agonizing pain; perhaps because a harrow is a farming implement with metal blades, dragged across a field to break up and smooth out the soil.

Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: agriculture grief suffering
16th December 2019 | Chelsea Lam | 0 comments

Oh Bethlehem! Oh Austin!

I walked over and tossed vegetable scraps in the trash with a tinge of guilt at still not having a compost system set up. Then my soul turned to the Lord with arms crossed and heels dug in as if to say, “I can’t care about compost right now” or maybe, more accurately, “I refuse to care when so many people are hurting.”

Categories: Reflections
Tags: Advent Christmas grief USA