Eco Catholic

The real secret about voluntary poverty and simplicity is that it can be fun. A commitment to live in simple, unwasteful ways challenges us to limit our wants and to satisfy our needs through our own resourcefulness, ingenuity, and hard but satisfying work. We must dig deep, all the way down to that restless longing and yearning for the exercise of our creativity that prowls, mostly unsatisfied, within us.

Searching through thrift shops, learning to cook or bake bread from scratch, taking the bus to work, riding bicycles, planting and caring for a garden, volunteering at the local soup kitchen or recycling center, mending clothes and repairing things ourselves – all of these activities are endless sources of entertainment and deep emotional satisfaction. They require of us humility, faith, forbearance, generosity, and imagination. In return, there is a kind of boldness, good humor, heartiness and gratitude for life that accompany embarking upon this particular adventure.

My oldest friend Paige was always fascinated by the sea, its lure and lore. When he was a kid, model ships cluttered his room, posters of sail and nautical charts papered the walls. He read every book he could find about sailing and would rhapsodize about this passionate love and his dreams until we his friends got the picture.

The picture looked like this: Paige on the slippery deck of a battered but sturdy sailboat making its way slowly through an agitated sea under a dark, threatening sky. He is busy reefing the sails and securing thick, sodden lines on the deck, making the vessel ready to endure a storm. One arm flung across the sun-cracked paint on the mast, his hands wrapped in the rigging, he surveys the heaving, leaping surface of the sea ahead with steady, glittering eyes.

According to a Worldwatch Institute report featured on Vital Signs, a page on their Web site, global meat production increased by only 0.8 percent in 2009 to 281.5 million tons, a slowdown from the 2.4 percent growth rate of 2008. But the increase continued the steady growth of the past decade. Since 2000, global meat production has risen by 20 percent.

A watershed is the area of land where all of the water that is under it or drains off of it goes into the same place. John Wesley Powell, scientist geographer, put it best when he said that a watershed is: "that area of land, a bounded hydrologic system, within which all living things are inextricably linked by their common water course and where, as humans settled, simple logic demanded that they become part of a community."

Watersheds come in all shapes and sizes. They cross county, state, and national boundaries. In the continental United States, there are approximately 2,110 watersheds.

Tonight Evolutionary Christianity will broadcast its second live panel discussion. At 5:00pm Pacific / 8:00pm Eastern, host Michael Dowd will be joined by Karl Giberson, Ilia Delio, John Haught, and Joan Roughgarden for a roundtable discussion on "The Evolution of Faith and Reason".

Some of the questions that will be explored are: What does a healthy marriage between faith and reason look like? What widely accepted scientific facts present challenges to our faith? Why is it essential for religious people to offer inspiring interpretations of what God is revealing to us through science, and how can this be done most effectively?

This is a live event, with ample opportunity for you to pose questions for the panelists during the broadcast itself (via the computer interface). To sign up for access visit the Evolutionary Christianity blog's home page.