Elizabeth Johnson and Sr. Joan Chittister explain their ideas about God and the understanding that how a believer sees others and the whole of creation depends on how that person imagines God. Johnson explains that the Western Christian world for too long has focused on humans as sacred apart from the rest of creation. Our view of creation would change dramatically, she says, if we had a view of nature as sacred and in which God is continuously active.
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Episode 12 - Creation’s Relationship to the Creator
Sr. Joan and Johnson discuss creation’s relationship to the Creator. Johnson sees Jesus as exemplifying that relationship. She draws on a scene in Mark’s gospel where Jesus is placed “with the wild animals.” The setting, she said, “embodied the Jewish hope for redemption that included all of creation.” Jesus’ coming of age in a rural town, she says, made him familiar with not only the animals but all of the flowers and trees and the work of planting and harvesting that became integral images in his preaching.
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Episode 11 - Why Christianity Has to Rediscover God’s Relationship With the Earth
Elizabeth Johnson discusses the title and the basis for the accompanying meditations. She then details why Christianity has to rediscover God’s relationship with the earth, highlighting God’s care for all creatures. Throughout the episode, she speaks of “deep incarnation,” or God’s active engagement with all of creation, not just with humans, a dimension that takes on heightened significance in this era of climate crisis.
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Episode 10 - Why She Stays
Being a woman in the Catholic Church, a nun who insists on asking difficult questions and holding those in power to account for what they say and do can make for a sometimes lonely and difficult life.
So, she has been asked more than a few times, “Why do you stay?”
There are a lot of components to that answer and they were gathered years ago into an essay for the magazine, Lutheran Women Today.
In the essay, one of the most requested pieces of her writing for years after it was published in 1996, she asks “how it is possible, necessary even, for me as a Roman Catholic to stay in a church that is riddled with inconsistencies, closed to discussions about the implications of them and sympathetic only to invisible women.”
She answers in ways that are available only to someone committed to the institution in a creative way, tolerant of the church as a process that’s never fully finished, and willing to hold both the institution and herself to account. It also is an answer available to someone who doesn’t shy away from the conflicts that seem inevitable but also necessary if the process is to move toward a greater acceptance of women.
In this conversation, she expands on certain ideas in the essay – that “the sexist church that I love needs women for its own salvation” and that “the church and women are sanctifying one another.”
She has stayed for a long time – this year marked her 70 th in the community of the Erie Benedictines – and she has no intention of leaving any time soon.
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Episode 9 - Engaging the World and Traditions Beyond the Monastery
As a woman religious and spiritual leader of global significance, Sr. Joan Chittister came into contact with members of other faith traditions around the world. One of the results was the book, Welcome to the Wisdom of the World (Eerdmans, 2010), which understands those traditions in contemporary circumstances.
In this episode Joan describes how she came to understand the significance of other traditions. “These are the deepest, most ancient religious and spiritual traditions that the world has to offer. And in every one of them, you have to ask yourself: ‘Do you believe in God?’
If you believe in God, so do they, and how, if you believe in the One God, how can you not imagine, then, that that God is speaking to every one of us in another tongue, in other symbols, at other moments of both asceticism and celebration.”
Those convictions carry with them practical implications. In Joan’s case, one of the most visible is the Global Peace Initiative of Women, involving women religious leaders from a range of faith traditions.
The organization has been responsible over decades for meeting with women of different cultures and faith, including those in conflict with one another. Joan’s understanding of the wisdom of the world carries practical implications for each of us.
Risking the Questions invites you into conversations most of us have only in our minds. Sr. Joan Chittister — whose courageous spiritual insights come from 70 years as a Benedictine sister — and her friend and biographer, former National Catholic Reporter editor Tom Roberts, discuss deep and universal topics. Listen as they explore questions like the nature of God, our purpose in life, how to respond to changing times, and more. See what questions and answers arise in you.
This podcast, a joint project of Benetvision and NCR, is made possible in part by Bill and Jeanne Buchanan.
Ireland