For The Warming Of The Earth – Book Review
For The Warming Of The Earth: Music, faith and ecological crisis, by Mark Porter, June 2024. SCM Press, ISBN 978-0-334-06568-5, 214 pages. RRP £40 (paperback)
In For the Warming of the Earth, Mark Porter invites us to visit and explore varying musical projects and approaches that foster connections between feelings and attitudes towards the reality of climate breakdown, and the motivations to convey related messages and to worship a loving Creator.
It becomes clear that, for all the contributing artists and interviewees described and quoted in the book, those dynamics are very much entwined. Porter takes a robust approach in disentangling these and repositioning them within useful paradigms concerned with music and relationships. His main themes in doing so are Creativity, Coalition, Community and Pragmatism.
Beginning with projects that invite new songs written round the themes of Creation and ecology, to compile into a Climate and Environment focused album, Porter raises issues such as the relevance of the worship song format in encouraging environmental engagement, without that engagement becoming the sole focus of worship, He speaks of navigating tensions in the relationship between the pragmatic and the ideal, and demonstrates a narrative of God’s kingdom and humanity’s caretaker role within a gospel message encompassing not just personal sin and salvation, but every aspect of our lives, and that of the earth. Protest songs, written and used by Christian Climate Action, which can be an act of prophesy, embodying prayer, allowing inter-religious solidarity, creating dilemmas, and asking for God’s work in changing hearts and minds, are usefully discussed as mediation between faith and activism.
Further paradigms are found in festivals, where music is used as part of a toolbox for educating and motivating, as well as stimulating debate and participation. Porter asks questions about the efficacy of environmental communication through music, and the extent to which this connects to behavioural changes and action on a wider scale. These are partly answered in the suggestion that pointers to lifestyle change and activism could be more prominently placed in each festival programme.
Ecological requiem is presented as a creative form that enables integration within a larger liturgical journey, pioneering multiple emotional musical narratives, and leading participants along different pathways of experience. Forest churches are explored, as offering a space for reworking human-nature relationships, with music and sound as a medium for encounter between people and nature spaces. Perhaps his brief consideration of nature’s sounds, or, sadly, increasing lack of sounds, as inspiration for worship or lament, could be beneficially expanded here.
Mark Porter’s carefully and clearly written debate provides us with much inspiration for conversations and experimentation by musicians, environmentalists and worship leaders. By asking crucial, but as yet not fully answered, questions, such as “who needs to hear what message, in what musical form, from whom?” and “which creative possibilities remain just a dream, and which can become reality?” he brings us to ask more, similarly powerful, questions. These grapple with demands of traditions, expectations, and degrees of willingness to encounter new possibilities, and to adapt what has been tried to new situations.
Catherine Fish
Comments on "For The Warming Of The Earth – Book Review"
No comments found.Add your own comment to "For The Warming Of The Earth – Book Review"
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
Next: Come, Have Breakfast – Book Review
Previous: A Climate of Truth by Mike Berners-Lee – Book Review
Leave a Reply