Brian J. Sauder (MAR ’10), recently testified before the US EPA in Chicago regarding Coal Combustion Residuals (CCG), otherwise known as coal ash. He is currently the Central Illinois Congregational Outreach and Policy Coordinator for Faith in Place.

Brian is addressing issues of social justice and the environment, challenging the EPA to consider coal ash as a hazardous material, given the troubling rates of cancer in and around the Oakwood, IL area, where large mounds of coal ash continue to poison the ground and water. His testimony is a great example of how Christians can be active participants in working toward redeeming God’s created order.

Brian’s testimony is included below:

“I want to begin by thanking you for holding this public hearing on the proposed EPA rule for regulating coal ash. I have traveled three hours by bus from Central Illinois this morning to tell you that we in Central Illinois need the EPA to regulate coal ash as a hazardous waste under Subtitle C.

I work for Faith in Place, the Illinois affiliate for Interfaith Power and Light, as the Central Illinois Outreach Coordinator. We work with religious congregations in Illinois and across the nation to help them better steward the earth. As a part of my outreach in Central Illinois, I have talked with four churches in Oakwood, IL, home of three coal ash impoundment sites next to the Dynegy Coal Burning Power Plant, and the Bunge North American Corporation coal ash dump site located in the town of Oakwood. Oakwood residents, and their four coal ash sites, are also located next to the Middle Fork of the Vermillion River, a designated national Wild and Scenic River.

Illinois EPA testing around one of the dump sites in Oakwood have found lead levels 3.5 to 4 times the Illinois standard for ground water, as well as high levels of boron, iron, and manganese, all which have tested above the state ground water standards.

The pastors, congregants, and community members in Oakwood, all buy bottled water when they can, but rely on private wells for the majority of their water use. Despite warnings from the Illinois EPA, many homes continue to use their water, for no alternative source has been provided.

I recently talked to four pastors in Oakwood, two of them at the same time, and the other two independently. All of them, without me asking, expressed that they had not seen such high levels of cancer in their congregations since they moved to Oakwood to take their pastoral positions. An EPA draft risk assessment released in August 2007, shows that the cancer risk for exposure to coal ash is 9 times higher than the cancer risk of smoking a pack of cigarettes a day.
Coal ash in Oakwood, IL, is currently not handled in a way that regards the health and safety of the people of Oakwood. As a person of faith, and one that works with people of faith, we find in common a commandment to love our neighbor, to treat one another as we would desire to be treated.

Often throughout our faith histories, our traditions have failed in loving our neighbors. By grace, we have worked to denounced those unfortunate actions, and we have taken steps to repent and reconcile. The proposed Subtitle C by the EPA is a move in the right direction for coal companies to repent and begin to reconcile for the cancer and harmful health results of mishandled coal ash on communities. Subtitle C will begin this process in Oakwood and for the communities around the nation like Oakwood that have coal ash impoundments. As a person of faith I believe there is grace available, and categorizing coal ash as a hazardous waste under Subtitle C is a necessary first step for communities like Oakwood to recover from this injustice.”

Recent years have witnessed a massive growth of research on addiction. When the Yale Center of Alcohol Studies was moved to Rutgers University in 1962, it was the only research institution of its kind. Today, approximately one hundred addiction research centers are housed at major universities across the United States. Most of the work is being done by natural and social scientists. Theologians have written comparatively little on addiction, philosophers even less.

In short, efforts to understand and ameliorate addictive behavior have been unnecessarily limited by scientific accounts of addiction. In particular, because so much of the public discourse on addiction is conducted in scientifically reductive terms, many Christians who rightly sense the spiritual significance of addiction are unable to articulate this significance in theologically substantive ways. Such a theological articulation can be provided by attending to three broad theses.

First, that philosophical analysis of human action is required to clear up many of the conceptual confusions that plague the discourse of addiction studies. Within that discourse, addiction is construed as either a disease or a type of willful choice. Neither of those categories is adequate to the phenomenon of addiction. For instance, the disease concept obscures the extent to which persons may be expected to take responsibility for their addictions, and the choice concept obscures the distinctiveness of the addictive experience. Alternatively, the category of “habit” is indispensable for charting an intelligible path between the muddled polarities of “disease” and “choice,” permitting us to describe addiction in a non-contradictory way, without doing violence to the testimonies of persons with addictions.

Human persons develop habits in order to facilitate the pursuit of specific human goods. Thus, if addiction is appropriately characterized as a type of human habit, we may ask about the specific kinds of goods that draw human persons into habits of addiction. This is a strange way of speaking; we are so gripped by the destructive effects of addiction that we are not accustomed to considering its constructive appeal.

Secondly, I think that the prevalence and power of addiction indicates the extent to which a society fails to provide non-addictive modes of acquiring certain kinds of goods necessary to human welfare. Addiction is therefore an embodied critique of the culture which sustains it, and is therefore a peculiarly modern habit that can be viewed as a mirror reflecting back to us aspects of modern culture that we tend to overlook or suppress. Persons with severe addictions are in a sense contemporary prophets that we ignore to our own demise, for they show us who we truly are.

Christians must heed prophets. Christians, therefore, are called to appropriately describe the addictive experience and to consider how the church may be complicit in the production of a culture of addiction.

Finally, the theological category of sin is an inextricable element of addiction, and can only deepen and extend our understanding of addiction. Addiction is not identical to sin, but neither can it be separated from sin. The power of addiction cannot be adequately appraised until addiction is understood as a misguided enactment of our quest for right relationship with God. Thus, although it is true that the church has much to learn from “recovery groups” such as Alcoholics Anonymous, it is also true that the church has much to offer to the recovery movement and indeed to all of us who struggle with addiction.

Therefore, I believe that any theological treatment of sin must contain these three elements if we are to both help those who struggle with addiction, even these prophets both remind us of the vast areas of darkness within the deepest dimensions of our own souls, and serve as agents of warning to a culture that in many respects continues to spiral out of control.

written by Kent Dunnington, Assistant Professor, Greenville College

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him.  He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. (Colossians 1:15-17 NIV)

The alarm blares at 6 AM, the coffee pot gurgles its last few steamy gasps as the aroma of Starbucks’ Anniversary Blend wafts through the air. I click the Weather Channel icon on the laptop for hourly updates on the temperature and the likelihood of precipitation before checking a national news site or two. A hot shower precedes the climate controlled ride into the office while NPR fills me in on the events that have already transpired in Europe and Asia. I check email, read, do some writing, grab some Indian food on Green Street, revise old lectures, check email again (and again), before heading home.

This rather mundane sequence of events could easily apply to Christian and atheist alike. In other words, in our very modern era, it is not always so easy to discern what difference God makes. Put even more sharply, it’s easy to live as if God does not exist.

Theologian Craig Gay has coined the rather troubling term “practical atheists.” He asserts that the pressures of daily life, our consumer-oriented culture, and our general technical efficacy encourage us to go about our daily lives without giving God much thought.

Stated bluntly, it is the assumption that even if God exists he is largely irrelevant to the real business of life. To put this somewhat more tactfully, contemporary society and culture so emphasize human potential and human agency and the immediate practical exigencies of the here and now, that we are for the most part tempted to go about our daily business in this world without giving God much thought. Indeed, we are tempted to live as if God did not exist, or at least as if his existence did not practically matter. (The Way of the Modern World, p. 2).

We now live in a world that is increasingly succumbing to technological control and expertise. The immovable boundaries of time and space are getting blurrier. Advances in medicine have us living longer than ever, promising a future when death will come on our terms. Communication technology enables face to face chats with friends and families several time zones away. Our food choices are no longer held hostage to the seasons. Gratefulness easily degenerates into expectation as what was once viewed as a gift of the earth is now perceived as ‘the made’ and manufactured. June strawberries may be a gift from God, but only human technology can make November strawberries a reality (or, at least make them look tasty).

In short, God is really only necessary for the things that we still can’t control. We’re not exactly sure how God should fit into our lives. But this is actually the wrong question. The real question is how we should ‘fit into’ or participate in God’s life. Either way however, we are hard pressed to describe how others might know we’re a Christian by the way we live—apart perhaps from our Sunday morning activities. We are practical atheists.

In reality however, God continues as the creator and sustainer of the universe through his Son. So, here are a couple of very open-ended questions that are worth asking of ourselves:

• What would your life look like if you began to routinely reflect on the reality of God’s provisional care?
• How might the very sustaining of reality by Christ impact the daily activities of your life?