REGINA – In modern society, people talk plenty about nature and the environment, but when it comes down to reality, they don’t actually experience what God has created around us.
And that makes for a lonely planet, says Fr. Greg Kennedy.
“The planet itself is lonely,” said Kennedy, quite bluntly. “We belong to the planet, it wants us to love it and to care for it and by not doing so (that) makes the Earth quite lonely.”
Kennedy is an author and poet who is also spiritual director at the Ignatius Jesuit Centre in Guelph, Ont. The centre promotes right relationships with God, each other and creation in the tradition of St. Ignatius of Loyola and through engagement with the land. Kennedy is to deliver the annual Nash Memorial Lecture Feb. 28 at Campion College, the Jesuit undergraduate campus at the University of Regina.
Titled “Attached and Indifferent: Technological Living on a Lonely Planet,” Kennedy aims to follow up on what fellow Jesuit Pope Francis hinted at in his environmental encyclical Laudato Si’ when he wrote that people are too detached from the planet on which they live.
“We’re lonely, creation is lonely and nobody is getting any happier,” said Kennedy, who was born and raised in Hamilton, Ont., and earned a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Ottawa.
The knowledge of creation and the environment is there, Kennedy acknowledges. It’s just that we don’t experience it as we should.
Source: [ Catholic Register ]
