The Great Conversation: Nature and the Care of the Soul

＂We are surrounded by a world that talks, but we don’t listen. We are part of a community engaged in a vast conversation, but we deny our role in it.＂

In the face of climate change, species loss, and vast environmental destruction, the ability to stand in the flow of the great conversation of all creatures and the earth can feel utterly lost to the human race. But Belden C. Lane suggests that it can and must be recovered, not only for the sake of endangered species and the well-being of at-risk communities, but for the survival of the world itself.

The Great Conversation is Lane’s multi-faceted treatise on a spiritually centered environmentalism. At the core is a belief in the power of the natural world to act as teacher. In a series of personal anecdotes, Lane pairs his own experiences in the wild with the writings of saints and sages from a wide range of religious traditions. A night in a Missourian cave brings to mind the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola; the canyons of southern Utah elicit a response from the Chinese philosopher Laozi; 500,000 migrating sandhill cranes rest in Nebraska and evoke the Sufi poet Farid ud-Din Attar. With each chapter, the humility of spiritual masters through the ages melds with the author’s encounters with natural teachers to offer guidance for entering once more into a conversation with the world.

Belden C. Lane is Professor Emeritus of Theological Studies, American Religion, and History of Spirituality at Saint Louis University. He is the author of Backpacking with the Saints: Wilderness Hiking as Spiritual Practice, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and MountainSpirituality, and Ravished by Beauty: The Surprising Legacy of Reformed Spirituality.