Theological compost: Breaking down our relationship with the land

Image credit: Zoe Richardson (@dirtjoy) at Unsplash.com

We hear from Emma Lietz Bilecky about faith, farming, climate grief and the inspiration behind her new book, Decomposing Holy Ground.

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Hello Emma. Would you introduce yourself and tell us about your background? What brought you to this point in your life and your current focus?

I studied theology as an undergraduate student before going to divinity school. Though I had grown up in a religious setting, it was at that time that I began to understand something deeply anti-material in certain strains of American evangelicalism. As a committed environmentalist, the tension between religion and the environment didn’t sit right with me until I encountered writing on faith, food and land. I was learning to farm at the time, and the idea of bridging these two worlds felt attractive enough that I enrolled at Duke Divinity School and in an environmental management programme concurrently. I’ve been working, writing and teaching at this intersection ever since – which led me to the Farminary at Princeton Seminary where the questions that began the project took shape. But even while farming, I began to recognize something deeply troubling in our relationship to land that had much to do with the history to which that land bore witness and everything to do with the current planetary and climactic moment in which we find ourselves. The act of farming has continued to be deeply revealing for me as a way of unworking and reworking these legacies; and at the same time, it is a practice of surviving beyond them.

Tell us about your new book, Decomposing Holy Ground. What is it about?

In short, the book chronicles a process of unlearning religious inheritances through farming in a time of climate change. It is about the ways in which the particular practices of farm work in certain places have transformed my understanding of the land and the divine. I hope the book can be read as an invitation to the same work wherever and with whomever it lands.

What made you decide to write this book?

Through working with seminary students at the Princeton Theological Seminary Farminary Project, I came to the realization that the scale of climate change – which changes everything – far exceeds the scale of the solutions that most of us imagine will address it. Climate change is not just the weather but all the broken land relations that perpetuate the destabilization we are witnessing in real time. It hadn’t felt like theological education or language had really caught up to this new reality – and still assumed the stable and predictable world we read into our Scriptures. Religious texts and language seemed to me a way of ‘fixing’ (in more than one sense) a world that was already evading our grasp. We were worshipping stability as a way of avoiding culpability, and nothing in our prayer or preaching said enough about how much of an existential threat this was, not only to our daily lives but to our religious practice. I wanted to prod at the ways a changing earth necessitates changes in our images of and words about God. Since the earth has always been a text through which we encounter the divine, what happens when that text is being rewritten?

Your grief at the destruction of earth and our environment really comes through in your writing; it's a very personal encounter with the land. What do you think this approach to theology can add to discussions around climate change/collapse?

I hear so many students and others carrying a profound sense of apathy over the realities of climate change, the ambivalence of our leaders in addressing it, and the powerlessness they feel to make a difference. Others throw themselves into the work to do what they can, which is certainly admirable. But both responses seem to me to contain within them a kind of avoidance. I see grief as a productive emotion to metabolize – allowing us a different way forward than the despair or hyperactivity that can also be misdirected. I think theological and religious language make space for a grief that lends itself to a transformed relationship to land. I see concepts like sin and repentance as useful in this moment if they can be freed from some of their more punitive and colonial uses. Much of this depends on conceiving ourselves less as individuals and more as collectives, which climate change is asking us to do.

This book has a really fresh angle – a focus on soil and cultivated land. Who has inspired you and who else might people want to read if they are interested in the intersection between soil, farming and theology?

I am truly inspired by farmers. Most farmers I’ve met who are living and sustaining on land seem to have a deep understanding and realistic assessment of where we are collectively. They tend to be stoic and hardworking with plenty of profound insights about the nature of reality, because they perceive subtle shifts in ecosystems every day.

I am also inspired by Indigenous scholars who are similarly attentive to land, and environmental justice activists who understand the inextricable connection between people and the places we live from, especially where those places are sites of harm. While many of these authors do not write about farming and theology explicitly, they are all doing theological work with land: Robin Wall Kimmerer, of course, Vine Deloria, Jr, Willie Jennings, Lauret Savoy, Sarah Augustine, Randy Woodley, Leah Penniman, Catherine Flowers. I loved reading Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira this year. And then of course there’s Ellen Davis and Norman Wirzba, my teachers at Duke who have done so much in agrarian theology and biblical scholarship.

If there is one message you’d like people to take away from the book, what would it be?

I’d like to encourage people to keep following the questions that arise in whatever place they find themselves, to pay attention to and learn to love rather than fear the land as the world changes.

Thank you Emma.

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Emma Lietz Bilecky is researches the connection between theology, land use and farming. She lives in Colorado where she farms, teaches, and works to connect people and land.

Her book, Decomposing Holy Ground, is out this month. Order here before the end of October for 20% off.