LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY krasiviye_slova) I just got back from an interesting lecture by Dr. David Gushee on Evangelicals and the Environment. While I suspect Dr. Gushee and I would vehemently disagree on a number of issues, based on this lecture he wins my intellectually honest award, and I think the world would be improved if more evangelicals were like him.

What relates to this community is that he and his organization, the Evangelical Climate Initiative, have been attacked by the far right with a organization created basically for the purpose of opposing them the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance. The ISA, of course, has the word dominion in their title. There was an interesting little sub-discussion on about dominionism, and Dr. Gushee commented to the effect that the use of dominion by the ISA is based on a misreading of the Bible.   Gushee debated one of the ISA co-founders, E. Calvin Beisner, recently and had an interesting critique of ISA's theology as pre-modern.  Apparently Beisner argued that since God promised he would never again destroy the world by flood that humans shouldn't be concerned by rising sea levels.  Gushee's response was "God won't destroy the world by flood again, but that doesn't mean that we won't."  (I think I got the quote down correctly.  There might be a word or two that are off.)  He also went on to explain some of the tension within the Evangelical movement between the far right, the center, and the left over moral issues and how (and what) Christians should be taking action on. All in all, quite the interesting lecture.   And my heart rose a bit when he suggested that the far right evangelicals (Dobson, Falwell, etc.) are in the process of marginalizing themselves.

And the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance -- definitely creepy.