Naomi Bosch is an agricultural scientist and freelance writer based in Croatia. She’s a founding member of the Friends of A Rocha in Germany, and now the Friends of A Rocha in Croatia. The topic of her Masters thesis were high value tree agroforestry systems including fruit trees and domestic animals. She’s now making plans to put her thesis into practice by building her own regenerative farm in Croatia, together with her Croatian shepherd. Find out more about her at plentiful-lands.com or by signing up to her newsletter.
As a child growing up in church, I heard and read these words by Jesus countless times. God’s kingdom is ‘here’, it’s ‘close’, it’s ‘coming’. Yet, little did I know just how close that kingdom of God really is! Or that I would discover it in truly unexpected ways …
David Attenborough’s latest BBC documentary, ‘Extinction: the facts’ makes shocking but deeply compulsive watching. Viewers have spoken of being so overwhelmed as to switch off and return later, and being moved to anger and sleeplessness. I wasn’t as depressed as many, and will come back to why.
Biodiversity is a word you won’t find in the Bible, but the concept is profoundly biblical. As we look through the great themes of the Bible, the pattern is clear: God has a passion for biodiversity that runs from beginning to end.
Sometimes the Christian Gospel is described as a universal message that speaks to all cultures. I profoundly disagree! The Gospel is not a set of abstract philosophical concepts that are […]
History is written in the landscapes of the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon. Baalbek with its magnificent Roman ruins, more ancient rounded hills known as tells, and long rusted barbed wire and tank emplacements. For good or ill we leave our mark on the land long after we have gone. Can people tell what we believe about God from what we write in the landscape?
It is easy to get increasingly technical about the year in, year out, work of nature conservation. So, from time to time it is good to be reminded, in an entirely different register, of what we are dealing with, of what creation is.
Recently, I was in Kathmandu, speaking on creation care to a group of about 90 Christian leaders from across Nepal, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. They were really receptive… until I got to God’s future plans for creation. Surely we’re all going to heaven? What about the Rapture? Won’t there be a new creation? Won’t the earth be destroyed by fire?
‘Of making many books there is no end’, wrote the philosopher, ‘and much study wearies the body’. So yet another new book on creation care may tempt you to click to another page. So, why is this book different?
The book of Jonah is short and contains just one story. It’s usually interpreted as reminding us we can’t run away from God, and as showing the Gospel as good news of God’s desire to forgive the sin of people who genuinely turn to him. All this is clearly there, but there’s more to Jonah and to the Gospel than this suggests.
This calls for a bit of imagination… Picture a meeting, beyond the limits of time and space, between the first human and the most famous critic of Christianity’s environmental credentials. Let’s eavesdrop on what they might say to each other…
