Green Sisters: A Spiritual Ecology (review)

Gustavo Gutiérrez has written, "Every great spirituality is connected with the great historical movement of the age in which it was formulated." In this book Sarah McFarland Taylor tells the fascinating and hopeful story of Roman Catholic women who are re-envisioning religious life in direct response to the pressing environmental concerns of our day. Taylor has identified an emergent movement of "environmentally activist Roman Catholic vowed religious women," variously referred to as "green nuns," "eco-nuns," and "green sisters." These women are living into an "engaged green monasticism" (118) by establishing "Earth Literacy" centers, sponsoring retreats and workshops on ecospirituality, ecotheology, and ecojustice, and developing rituals that honor the earth and reconnect humans to it. They are also establishing organic gardens, retrofitting buildings with sustainable technologies, and engaging in corporate and political activism on behalf of creation. Many are integrating a cosmic consciousness and sustainable practices into their Rules of Life. This book details how communities of green sisters are "reinventing and renewing the Catholic monastic tradition" in light of growing ecological awareness and concerns (118).

Writing as a scholar of North American religion, the author draws upon ethnographic, historical, and gender analysis to describe the "lived practice" of these green sisters. Taylor has immersed herself in the lives of green sisters for over a decade; her narrative emerges from intimate knowledge of the sisters' lives gained by visiting their houses, attending their retreats and conferences, planting vegetables and shucking garlic with them, reading their cookbooks, and conducting extensive interviews with them. What emerges is a nuanced interpretation that combines intimacy in its descriptions of its subjects with sufficient critical acumen to situate this movement within historical, cultural, and theological contexts. Taylor's methodology is instructive for scholars of Christian spirituality. If Christian spirituality as an academic field examines the lived experience of Christian faith, then Taylor's interdisciplinary approach and her goal of describing the living practice of the green sisters suggest creative applications for the study of lived faith, especially with respect to practice. Much scholarship in Christian spirituality necessarily focuses upon texts, presenting interpreters with the dilemma of how to access the experiences or practices embedded therein. For Taylor, the lives of the green sisters are her primary "texts." She applies interpretive frameworks drawn from anthropology and history, but she also relies heavily upon the women's own reports of their experience. She frequently allows sisters to challenge her assumptions, her interpretations, and even her interview questions. Taylor also places practice at the heart of her inquiry as she interprets how the everyday activities of the sisters embody their ecological ideals and how the practices themselves bear meaning.

Taylor has identified seven areas of focus within which green sisters live out their "response to the call of the earth" (5). Those areas are: greening the religious vows, ecologically sustainable living as daily spiritual practice, reinhabiting Western monasticism, ecological food choice and contemplative cooking, sacred agriculture, seed saving, and the "greening" of prayer and liturgy (5). Each chapter focuses on one of these seven areas within which Taylor describes specific practices in further detail. One of the most striking features of the book arises out of this organizational framework: Taylor identifies a phenomenon within the sisters' lives she calls "ecospiritual mimetics," that is, "dynamic correspondences between the spiritual and the biophysical landscapes, which green sisters seek to harmonize" (20). There are numerous instances within Christian literature where the earthly or cosmic landscape is interpreted as a mirror of the human person's interior "soulscape." This is also true of contemporary nature writing. However, Taylor moves beyond these ways of construing the human/nature relationship, claiming to notice a mimetic quality "in which the spirituality and ways of life of ecologically minded sisters embody the earth's own patterns of diversity, pluraculture, planting, conservation, renewal, and growth" (20). The sisters' ecological ideals reflect their spiritual values, these are reflected in "green" practices, and these practices are enacted within the physical landscapes the sisters...