John Hanson's Book Review List 2020-2021

Green Blades Books of the Month

September 2020 – October 2021 Reviewed by Rev. John Hanson

Looking for ideas for a book group in your church or community?

Find some great ideas here in this listing of

14 Green Blades books featured monthly since September 2020!

September 2020

Moral Ground

Kathleen Moore, Michael Nelson, editors 2010 Do we have a moral obligation to take action to protect the future of a planet in Peril? Diverse writers respond.

October 2020

God of Earth

Kristin Swenson

Swenson follows the liturgical year, Advent through Pentecost, to help understand how Christians can see the incarnate God, Jesus Christ, as creator and redeemer of the whole cosmos.

November 2020

The Universal Christ

Richard Rohr

This is primarily a theological treatise on who Jesus is in Rohr’s estimation. Yet it has many ties to creation care; especially in statements such as, God loves things by becoming them.

December 2020

The Nature Principle

Richard Louv

In Louv’s words, this book asks: What would our lives be like if our days and nights were as immersed in nature as they are in technology? How can each of us help create that life-enhancing world, not only in a hypothetical future, but right now, for our families and for ourselves?

January 2021

No One is too Small to make a Difference

Greta Thunberg

Greta Thunberg was 17 years old in 2020. She was Time Magazine’s person of the year in 2019. She has addressed the European Union, the U.N., and the U.S. Congress.

February 2021

Wild Hope

A book for the Lenten journey, by Gayle Boss, illustrated by David G. Klein

We share this beautiful blue-green globe with creatures magnificent, delicate, intricate—and now vanishing faster than any other time in Earth’s history. Spend Lent with twenty-five of these wild ones. Vivid descriptions of their lives fill us with wonder—and grief at what they suffer on a planet shaped by human choices, awakening us to greater compassion— and a wild hope that from all this death and ruin, something new could rise.

Also February 2021

Spiritual Ecology

Edited by Llewellyn Vaughn-Lee 2019

A compilation of various writers from many different spiritual backgrounds, predominantly speaking of the earth as a living, breathing entity, with a soul.

March 2021

Active Hope

Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone 2012

A refreshingly new approach to creation care, ecological change, and climate change. They bring the reader on a journey of renewal and hope by articulating how we can change ourselves in order to address critical issues such as climate change and threats to our planet.

April 2021

Reflections from the North Country

Sigurd Olson, 1976

Written forty-five years ago, and considered the most intellectual of Olson’s writings, poses a prophetic question. The ultimate question is what kind of world we really want: more of endless exploitation or one involving proper relationship with our land? Would we choose wisely in the crucial years ahead?

May 2021

The Way the World Is

John Polkinghorne

This is not a book about eco-faith issues directly. It is the author’s perspective on how the Christian faith is a lens through which we can discern God’s active presence in the world.

June 2021

A New Climate for Theology

Sally McFague 2008

McFague is calling upon the Christian community to become informed and active in recognizing and taking actions to address the crisis that Climate Change has brought about.

August 2021

The Hours of the Universe

Ilia Delio 2021

Ilia Delio, Franciscan Sister, founder of the Center for Christogenesis, and scholar of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, claims an urgent need to construct a new religious story today….[a] theology that does not begins with evolution and the story of the universe. Delio regards Christ as first in God’s intention to love. Love is a fundamental force of attraction in the universe that overcomes all inertia, entropy, breakdown, and dissipation…We must learn to love over and over again if we are to evolve into a unified planet, a wholeness of being, an earth community of compassion and peace.

September 2021

How to Rescue the Earth without Worshiping Nature

Tony Campolo 1994

I chose to review this book for two reasons. I didn’t realize a Christian writer was concerned about the environment in 1994. The other reason is the author, an evangelical conservative Christian best known for his passion for social justice issues, centering mostly around the poor.

October 2021

The Right to be Cold

Sheila Watt-Coutier 2015, Univ. Minn. Press

The book is a call to arms to be engaged in the struggle to curb climate change. It is also a fascinating window into the lives of the natives occupying the region of the Arctic circle who are fighting for the right to be cold.