Living Well When Uncertainty’s a Sure Thing

by Larry L. Rasmussen
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7 books
There is widespread agreement that we face a cascade of crises that add up to a planetary emergency. How do we live meaningfully and well as we confront this? What kind of shared faith might bring about moral, spiritual and cultural transformation? The books described here are my reading toward this end.
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The Planet You Inherit

Letters to My Grandchildren when Uncertainty's?a?Sure Thing
Larry L. Rasmussen, 2022
Our children's and grandchildren's generation face a world affected by climate instability, mass uncertainty, and breathtaking extinction. In fact, they face the reality that human activity is changing the planet from one geological epoch to another, named as the shift from the Holocene epoch to the Anthropocene. These are my letters about meaningful living in such a time as this. They may be the first love letters consciously written by grandparents living in one geological epoch (the Holocene) to grandchildren living in another.

When Time Is Short

Finding Our Way in the Anthropocene
Timothy Beal, 2022
All human civilizations have been hosted by the Holocene epoch and its climate stability. Now that we are moving into the Anthropocene epoch, how do we find our way when Earth has largely spun out of human control? Beal explains how we got here and what is now essential to finding alternative futures for humans and the rest of the natural world. Drawing upon both Indigenous wisdom and the rereading of ancient texts, chiefly biblical, Beal takes us where we need to go, both spiritually and materially.

Underland: A Deep Time Journey

Robert Macfarlane, 2019
This is an engaging account of the darknesses under our feet—the “underland” of Earth—that shows the ways we’ve changed the planet and how knowledge of that might orient our life in the future. It’s a bracing demonstration of the place of landscapes, both seen and unseen, in our life and how we might think differently about them as well as about ourselves.

A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth

4.6 Billion Years in 12 Pithy Chapters
Henry Gee, 2021
Henry Gee is the author of numerous books that bring Earth sciences and human sciences to popular audiences in engaging ways. This volume may well be the most readable description of the profound changes in the planet and its life over the course of Earth’s billions of years. Few science writers can cover the ground Gee does and do it in ways that draw everyone into the drama of life’s astonishing history on this planet.

Braiding Sweetgrass

Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants
Robin Kimmerer, 2013
Braiding Sweetgrass is the runaway bestseller by a botanist and nature writer who is also a member of the Potawatomi nation. While she studies plants in the way of objective, Western science, her Indigenous orientation and science learns from them in other ways, ways that are instructive for a reverential relationship of humans to the rest of the community of life. Kimmerer’s cascade of stories engage everyone of adult age in a manner that intertwines story with science and spirit. The reader leaves with a sacred sense of his or her world.

Sacred Nature

Restoring Our Ancient Bond with the Natural World
Karen Armstrong, 2022
Armstrong is a highly regarded and popular writer on religious affairs who treats works in a wide variety of faith traditions—Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Confucianism, Hinduism and Buddhism, among others. In this volume she unearths the sense of the sacred in the world religions and draws out their content and practices for the purpose of healing the bonds between human habitation and the natural world.

Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul

Celtic Wisdom for Reawakening to What Our Souls Know and Healing the World
John Philip Newell, 2021
John Philip Newell’s approach is to take one of those great traditions Armstrong knows, Celtic spirituality, and explore it in depth by way of exemplary figures that span centuries from the 2nd to the 20th. The outcome is what any human soul might experience and know deep down; namely, that in our traumatized world a sense of the sacred can be directed to the world’s healing. Materials for meditation, all drawn from Newell’s Celtic “saints,” are the fitting closing of the book.