Saying Grace
Transforming People, Transforming the World
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/jsrnc.v3i2.195Keywords:
Grace, Thanksgiving, CreationAbstract
This essay describes how the grace-saying act can be a vital source in the renewal of communities and the created world. I show how it has become difficult in modern times to appreciate this act’s practical and religious significance or perform it with much sincerity. I also argue that the loss of blessing and thanksgiving has a lot to do with the destruction of the world and its neighborhoods. I propose that as we learn to understand and then recover this practice, we will also participate in the healing of the world. Saying grace introduces us to a new understanding of ourselves as creatures placed in a world of gifts.
References
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________. 2003. The Eucharist (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press).
Stuart, Kevin. 1984. ‘My Friend, the Soil: A Conversation with Hans Jenny’, Journal of Soil and Water Conservation 39.3: 158-61.
Szerszynski, Bronislaw. 2005. Nature, Technology and the Sacred (Oxford: Blackwell). doi:10.1002/9780470774311.
Wirzba, Norman. 2003. The Paradise of God: Renewing Religion in an Ecological Age (New York: Oxford University Press).
________. 2005. ‘Attention and Responsibility: The Work of Prayer’, in Bruce Ellis Benson and Norman Wirzba (eds.), The Phenomenology of Prayer (New York: Fordham University Press): 88-100.
________. 2008. ‘The Touch of Humility: An Invitation to Creatureliness’, Modern Theology 24.2: 225-44. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0025.2007.00443.x.
________. 2000. Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press).
________. 2005. Liquid Life (Cambridge: Polity Press).
Berry, Wendell. 1969. The Long-Legged House (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World).
________. 1977. The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books).
________. 2002. ‘The Whole Horse’, in Norman Wirzba (ed.), The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry (Washington, DC: Counterpoint): 236-48.
________. 2003. ‘Going to Work’, in Norman Wirzba (ed.), The Essential Agrarian Reader: The Future of Culture, Community, and the Land (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press): 259-66.
Best, Steven, and Douglas Kellner. 1997. The Postmodern Turn (New York: The Guilford Press).
Bonaventure. 1956. The Journey of the Mind to God (trans. Philotheus Boehner; Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing).
Borgmann, Albert. 1987. Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
Chrétien, Jean-Louis. 2004. The Ark of Speech (London: Routledge).
Foltz, Bruce V. 2004. ‘Nature’s Other Side: The Demise of Nature and the Phenomenology of Givenness’, in Bruce V. Foltz and Robert Frodeman (eds.), Rethinking Nature: Essays in Environmental Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press): 330-41.
Gill, Eric. 1983. A Holy Tradition of Working (West Stockbridge, MA: The Lindisfarne Press).
Hall, Donald. 2003. Life Work (Boston: Beacon Press).
Halweil, Brian. 2004. Eat Here: Reclaiming Homegrown Pleasures in a Global Supermarket (New York: W.W. Norton & Co.).
Heidegger, Martin. 1968. What is Called Thinking (New York: Harper & Row).
Howard, Sir Albert. 2006 [1947]. The Soil and Health: A Study of Organic Agriculture (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press).
Hughes, John. 2007. The End of Work: Theological Critiques of Capitalism (Oxford: Blackwell).
Kass, Leon. 1994. The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of Our Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
Logan, William Bryant. 1995. Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth (New York: Riverhead).
Manoussakis, John. 2007. God After Metaphysics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press).
Nash, Roderick. 1987. ‘Aldo Leopold’s Intellectual Heritage’, in J. Baird Callicott (ed.), Companion to ‘A Sand County Almanac’: Interpretive and Critical Essays (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press): 63-88.
Pollan, Michael. 2006. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (New York: Penguin Books).
Roberts, Paul. 2008. The End of Food (Boston: Houghton Mif_in).
Schmemann, Alexander. 1973. For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press).
________. 2003. The Eucharist (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press).
Stuart, Kevin. 1984. ‘My Friend, the Soil: A Conversation with Hans Jenny’, Journal of Soil and Water Conservation 39.3: 158-61.
Szerszynski, Bronislaw. 2005. Nature, Technology and the Sacred (Oxford: Blackwell). doi:10.1002/9780470774311.
Wirzba, Norman. 2003. The Paradise of God: Renewing Religion in an Ecological Age (New York: Oxford University Press).
________. 2005. ‘Attention and Responsibility: The Work of Prayer’, in Bruce Ellis Benson and Norman Wirzba (eds.), The Phenomenology of Prayer (New York: Fordham University Press): 88-100.
________. 2008. ‘The Touch of Humility: An Invitation to Creatureliness’, Modern Theology 24.2: 225-44. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0025.2007.00443.x.
Published
2009-07-22
Issue
Section
Perspectives
How to Cite
Wirzba, N. (2009). Saying Grace: Transforming People, Transforming the World. Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, 3(2), 195-212. https://doi.org/10.1558/jsrnc.v3i2.195
