Trinity University Press

Moral Ground brings together the testimony of over 80 visionaries — theologians and religious leaders, scientists, elected officials, business leaders, naturists, activists, and writers — to present a diverse and compelling call to honor our individual and collective moral responsibilities to our planet. In the face of environmental degradation and global climate change, scientific knowledge alone does not tell us what we ought to do. The missing premise of the argument and much-needed centerpiece in the debate to date has been the need for ethical values, moral guidance, and principled reasons for doing the right thing for our planet, its animals, its plants, and its people. This book encourages a newly discovered, or rediscovered, commitment to consensus about our ethical obligation to the future and why it’s wrong to wreck the world.

Contributors include: Fred W. Allendorf, Bartholomew I, Mary Catherine Bateson, Thomas Berry, Wendell Berry, Marcus J. Borg, J. Baird Callicott, Courtney S. Campbell, F. Stuart Chapin III, Robin Morris Collin, Michael M. Crow, Dalai Lama, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Brian Doyle, David James Duncan, Massoumeh Ebtekar, Jesse M. Fink, Dave Foreman, Thomas L. Friedman, James Garvey, Thich Nhat Hanh, Paul Hawken, Bernd Heinrich, Linda Hogan, bell hooks, Dale Jamieson, Derrick Jensen, John Paul II, Martin S. Kaplan, Angayuqaq Oscar Kawagley, Stephen R. Kellert, Robin W. Kimmerer, Barbara Kingsolver, Shepard Krech III, Ursula K. Le Guin, Hank Lentfer, Carly Lettero, Oren Lyons, Wangari Maathai, Sallie McFague, Bill McKibben, Katie McShane, Curt Meine, Ming Xu, N. Scott Momaday, Kathleen Dean Moore, Hylton Murray-Philipson, Gary Paul Nabhan, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Michael P. Nelson, Barack Obama, Ernest Partridge, John Perry, Edwin P. Pister, Carl Pope, Robert Michael Pyle, David Quammen, Daniel Quinn, Kate Rawles, Tri Robinson, Libby Roderick, Holmes Rolston III, Deborah Bird Rose, Jonathan F. P. Rose, Carl Safina, Scott Russell Sanders, Lauret Savoy, Nirmal Selvamony, Ismail Serageldin, Peter Singer, Sulak Sivaraksa, Gary Snyder, James Gustave Speth, Brian Swimme, Bron Taylor, Paul B. Thompson, George Tinker, Joerg Chet Tremmel, Quincy Troupe, Mary Evelyn Tucker, José Galizia Tundisi, Brian Turner, Desmond Tutu, Steve Vanderheiden, John A. Vucetich, Kimberly A. Wade-Benzoni, Sheila Watt-Cloutier, Alan Weisman, Terry Tempest Williams, E. O. Wilson, and Xin Wei.

In the year he spent teaching at Borrego Pass, a remote Navajo community in northwest New Mexico, Kurt Caswell found himself shunned as persona non grata. His cultural missteps, status as an interloper, and white skin earned him no respect in the classroom or the community—those on the reservation assumed he would come and go like so many teachers had before. But as Caswell attempts to bridge the gap between himself and those who surround him, he finds his calling as a teacher and develops a love for the rich landscape of New Mexico, and manages a hard-won truce between his failings and successes.

Reverential, celebratory, antagonistic, and even erotic, this remarkable collection of essays interprets the Psalms as a collection of poetry. Written by 14 acclaimed poets, the essays approach the Psalms from a personal, often autobiographical perspective, demonstrating how relevant they remain for today’s readers. Alicia Ostriker examines the Psalms’ glory and their terror in a moving essay that revels in their moods of joy while acknowledging the brutality they invoke, linking their violence to events such as 9/11, the Palestinian uprisings, and the Rwandan massacres. Weaving autobiographical anecdotes with scholarly introspection, Enid Dame provides a Jewish explanation of Psalm 22, while editor Lynn Domina contemplates the pastoral life as she connects the everyday with phrases from the Psalms. From a former nun to a self-described left-wing Jew, from a Midrashic scholar to a Texas rancher, the contributors mirror the wide swath of humanity interested in, and affected by, the Psalms. Contributors include Robert A. Ayres, David Citino, Enid Dame, Madeline DeFrees, Lynn Domina, Jill Alexander Essbaum, Angie Estes, Diane Glancy, Janet McCann, Alicia Ostriker, Carl Phillips, Pattiann Rogers, Catherine Sasanov, and Daniel Tobin.