Digital Storytelling and the Earth
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 Creation, particularly to the earth, to the land, to outdoor places that matter to them.
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.
You can express interest in this project on the project website, and you can follow a news stream about it on my more general Storyingfaith.org site.
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?, 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
- Beloved Economies by Jess Rimington and Joanna Levitt Cee, and their website of great story videos
Videos, Films, and Series
- Joanna Macy on embracing pain
- Echo, a song by Julie Cooper, with cinematography by Stephen Prokter, that can be heard as an invitation from the Divine to engage the beauty of the earth
- “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”
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