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151 c h a p t e r 1 0 God Is Green; or, A New Theology of Indulgence Jeffrey W. Robbins We all contribute to climate change, but none of us can individually be blamed for it. So we walk around with a free- floating sense of guilt that’s unlikely to be lifted by the purchase of wind-power credits or halogen bulbs. Annina Rüst, a Swissborn artist-inventor, wanted to help relieve these anxieties by giving people a tangible reminder of their own energy use, as well as an outlet for the feelings of complicity, shame and powerlessness that surround the question of global warming. So she built a translucent leg band that keeps track of your electricity consumption. When it detects, via a special power monitor, that electric current levels have exceeded a certain threshold, the wireless device slowly drives six stainless-steel thorns into the flesh of your leg. “It’s therapy for environmental guilt,” says Rüst, who modeled her “personal techno-garter” on the spiked bands worn as a means of self-mortification by a monk in Dan Brown’s novel “The Da Vinci Code.” new york times magazine, 8th Annual Year in Ideas All those who believe themselves certain of their own salvation by means of letters of indulgence, will be eternally damned, together with their teachers. martin luther, thesis 32, from The Ninety-Five Theses In 1940, shortly after speaking with Colonel Oster at the Abwehr meeting during which he was enlisted in the plot against Adolf Hitler that would eventually lead to his imprisonment and execution, Dietrich Bonhoeffer penned what remains one of the most scathing attacks against theoretical or systematic ethics. As he wrote in the opening paragraph of the chapter “Ethics as Formation,” ethical reasoning had become entirely superfluous, not because of indifference and certainly not because of irrelevance. “On 152 Jeffrey W. Robbins the contrary,” Bonhoeffer wrote, “it arises from the fact that our period, more than any earlier period in the history of the west, is oppressed by a superabounding reality of concrete ethical problems.”1 In addition to the failure of moral theorists, Bonhoeffer also exposes the ethical failings of so-called reasonable people, ethical purists—or in his words, fanatics—who believe they “can oppose the power of evil with the purity of [their] will and of [their principle],” the solitary individual of conscience, who “fights a lonely battle against the overwhelming forces of inescapable situations which demand decisions”; the person of duty, who “will end by having to fulfill his obligation even to the devil; and the privately virtuous, who “knows how to remain punctiliously within the permitted bounds which preserve him from involvement in conflict” but who thereby “must be blind and deaf to the wrongs which surround him.”2 Bonhoeffer saw each of these as false, or at least insufficient, paths to meet the challenge of his age, and in what is perhaps the most recognized sentence from this fragmentary and unfinished work, he issues a clarion call: “Yet our business now is to replace our rusty swords with sharp ones.”3 Here we stand yet again at such a moment with the global economy in tatters, the U.S.-led war on terror ongoing, an energy market that is wildly fluctuating, and the global demand for energy escalating at an unsustainable pace that will only compound the environmental degradation already wrought. We stand intimately interconnected and interdependent with those around the world by the apparent triumph of global capital, but with outmoded political institutions and ideas to rein in what the political theorist Benjamin Barber rightly identifies as “savage capitalism.”4 And our religion, long caught up either in the culture wars and the micro-politics of identity or voluntarily confining itself as little more than self-help therapy, finds itself once again thrust in the public domain forcing a fundamental theo-political reevaluation of the basic modern liberal assumptions of secular sphere as the naked public square. In what follows, I offer three snapshots from a generation past. My purpose is not, unfortunately, to suggest the way forward but, more modestly, simply to raise the stakes of our present discussion on theology and energy. The questions asked by this book, while urgent and timely, are not new. They are the very questions and issues with which we have been faced for some time now, the very choices we have been...

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