“Living our vocation to be protectors of God’s handiwork is essential to a life of virtue; it is not an optional or a secondary aspect of our Christian experience.”

Our pursuit of economic growth must also encompass preservation of our habitat for all people, including future generations, by mitigating our carbon emissions.

While Laudato Si challenges us to simplify our material consumption, Pope Francis also points out the need to simplify how we spend our time. At the heart of both the desire to acquire more possessions and the compulsion to plan more activities is a false expectation of what we need to be happy.

I was surprised when, in spite of its reputation and well-documented shortcomings, Detroit became a place where I would witness the power of the Pope’s environmental encyclical call to action.

“When I lose myself, come untethered from the now, the “real,” the static compartmentalized world, then I find my spiritual home.” Kimberly Blaeser ’90, Wisconsin’s poet laureate, reflects on wonder in words and image.

In light of Pope Francis’s encyclical on ecology, Celia Deane-Drummond, Professor of Moral and Systematic Theology, leads a webinar conversation about what Catholic teaching tells us about our responsibility to protect and sustain creation.

My time spent hiking and travelling alone and with friends are punctuated with a certain practice that is so embedded in a modern person’s experience of visiting glorious, natural landscapes that it almost goes unnoticed: the desire to capture a certain scene or view on camera.

As I pondered Francis’s words of warning about something so ubiquitous in my life as air-conditioning, I began to wonder about other consumerist tendencies to which I was blind. So I decided to try an exercise to understand better my practices as a consumer.

This week, I decided to practice detachment. I decided to go through the house and detach myself from some of our possessions. The task was simple: fill up a bag each night and drop it off as a donation to a thrift store.

We often forget that the person before us is complete, whole, and complex. In remembering that God loves them utterly and they deserve my attentive presence, I learned a new generosity.

In this ever-moving, ever-changing, often endlessly busy world, it can be dangerously easy to develop tunnel vision towards the next item on our to-do list, and altogether miss the wonder and beauty of God’s creation around us.

Laudato Si’, Pope Francis’ recent encyclical on care for our common home is not an easy read. The difficulty of the text is not because of the inclusion of scientific analysis or economic terminology. Rather, this encyclical is a text that demands a conversion of life on the part of the reader.

FaithND encourages you to “live smaller” with the ecological virtues of Laudato Si.