Digital Storytelling and Creation

During the 2023-2024 academic year I will be working with a series of churches and other organizations on a digital storytelling project. In that project a very divere set of churches in wildly different contexts will be supporting their participants in crafting personal stories of their relationship to the land.

I am particularly interested in how our stories of the land, and our relationship to it, shape our engagement with issues of care for creation.

The world always seems brighter when you’ve just made something that wasn’t there before.

Neil Gaiman

Paradoxically, great storytelling makes us better able not to mistake our compositions for reality, better able to inhabit the silent uncertain spaces between the low notes of knowledge and the shrill tones of opinion, better able to feel, which is always infinitely more difficult and infinitely more rewarding than to know.

Maria Popova

Handouts

a 4-frame model based on the work of Bolman & Deal, and Cormode
slide deck from the 2023 EcoFaith Summit (15 April 2023)
Covenant of presence
Ground rules
Mutual invitation

Useful Websites

Storying Faith: Digital Storytelling as Faith Formation
Circle practice handouts
Caring for Creation the ELCA
Care for Creation the USCCB
Creation Care the ECUSA
Creation in Hinduism

Books and Articles

A bibliography on caring for creation created by Mark Yackel Juleen, and preferencing rural contexts
“Laudato ‘Si: On Care for Our Common Home” by Pope Francis
“Shifting Epistemologies, Shifting Our Stories—Where Might We Find Hope for a World on the Brink of Climate Catastrophe?, by Mary Hess
“Saving our Planet through Faith: A Buddhist-Christian Response,” Say Something Theological: The Student Journal of Theological Studies: Vol. 4 : Iss. 1 , Article 5.
Storytelling for Social Justice by Lee Ann Bell
Finding God in the Graffiti by Frank Rogers
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Roots and Routes: Calling, Ministry, and the Power of Place by Randy Litchfield
Storymaking: A Narrative Pedagogy for Transformative Christian Faith
Religions for Climate Justice: International Interfaith Statements
Theology of work and Development: The Theological and Ecological Responsibility of the Church in Development by Elly Kansime

Videos, Films, and Series

Joanna Macy on embracing pain
“Wisdom in the Age of Information” by Maria Popova
“3 seconds” first prize winner in the short film competition #film4climate
Why we need solidarity economics Manuel Pastor, USC
“This is water” a commencement speech by David Foster Wallace to Kenyon College
“Love Song to the Earth”
“One” by Birdtalker
“Creating a dream”by Xavier Rudd
“Stay Gentle” morphing into “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” by Brandi Carlile
“Beautiful Things” by Gungor
“Rhymes and Reasons” by John Dnever
“Lift us Up”