A Quaker Ecology with Cherice Bock

Join Quaker ecotheologian Cherice Bock in sharing about her newest book, A Quaker Ecology: Meditations on the Future of Friends on Tuesday, March 14 at 7pm - 8pm Eastern/4 pm Pacific.

In our best moments, Friends have been in the middle of the action around the social justice issues of each time period, discerning to the best of their abilities the direction the Inward Light leads and speaking truth to power. In our own time, climate justice can no longer be ignored if we want to have a healthy planet to live on and if we want to participate in the heart of the justice movements of the twenty-first century.

To work on climate justice requires Quakers in the United States to revisit the practices and history of the Religious Society of Friends, recognizing the ways we have been complicit in unjust land acquisition, natural resource depletion, the intersecting injustices surrounding environmental racism, classism, and gender disparities, and the impacts of globalization. This book offers a series of meditations on the Quaker ecology, both internally in our denomination as well as in our connections to the world around us. It forms an invitation to participate in an Eco-Reformation, altering the trajectory of our Society through re-membering our history and reimagining our future as participants in the community of all life.

Cherice is a recorded Quaker minister and a member of North Valley Friends in Oregon. She served as one of the founding co-clerks of Sierra-Cascades Yearly Meeting of Friends from 2017 to 2020. Bock holds a master of divinity degree from Princeton Theological Seminary and a master of science in environmental studies from Antioch University New England, and she is a Ph.D. candidate in the same field. She teaches at the college and seminary level in the areas of Bible, theology, and environmental justice, and she works as the creation justice advocate at Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon. She edits Barclay Press's Friends Bible study curriculum, Illuminate.

We encourage Friends to read the book (you can find it at Barclay Press in print or digital formats) and/or to listen to Cherice at the 2020 New England Yearly Meeting's annual sessions, where she presented the original content as part of their Bible Half-Hours

If there's enough interest, we're hoping to organize a book group to go deeper into Cherice's work. If you're interested, please make a note of that on the registration form and we will share more information as it becomes available.