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I started Rosemary Ruether's Gaia and God: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing. I want to start with two somber quotes, followed by a passage in which Ruether discusses the existence of divine being:
1. "This book is dedicated to Adiba Khader and her four daughters, Ghada (twenty-one), Abir (seventeen), Ghalda (twelve), and all the other mothers and children who died in the early morning of February 13, 1991, in a bomb shelter in Baghdad that was shattered by two American 'smart bombs.'
On page 12, Ruether states: "Deep repentance needs to happen among the powerful of the earth, to whose community I mostly belong. We need to bring the mad bombers out of the sky and make them stand before the rubble, the charred bodies of the dead, the sufferings of the living, and call them to account. We who belong to this community, however, also have to take responsibility for these mad bombers as our brothers (and sometimes sisters!)."
These are sobering words.
2. Here is what Ruether says about belief in a divine being, on page 5:
"We need a vision of a source of life that is 'yet more' than what presently exists, continually bringing forth both new life and new visions of how life should be more just and more caring. The human capacity for ethical reason is not rootless in the universe, but expresses this deeper source of life 'beyond' the biological. Consciousness and altruistic care are qualities that have some reflection in other animals, and indeed are often too poorly developed in our own species. To believe in divine being means to believe that those qualities in ourselves are rooted in and respond to the life power from which the universe itself arises."
