A lifelong atheist learns to jettison his simplistic views of religion (God as “an old guy sitting in a chair”) when he realizes that something very much like a religious zeal will be required to address the climate crisis.

The worry I have here is of Christians being enlisted into providing a religious imprimatur on any political movement, even one as worthy as I believe the environmental one to be. And yet I can’t help but think that the author of this piece is right: that we do need a shift in “values” (maybe virtues is a better term to use), not just bigger and better techno-fixes, if we want to make a sustainable society.

(Though, let me note for the record that I’m skeptical of simplistic dichotomies between “theism” and “panentheism” that seem to be popular in these circles. The idea of God in the classical theism of the sort that Sts. Augsutine, Anselm, and Thomas believed in is far from the caricature of an overly-anthropomorphized supernatural being “out there.”)