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To hope and act with creation, then, means to live an incarnational faith, one that can enter into the suffering and hope-filled “flesh” of others, by sharing in the expectation of the bodily resurrection to which believers are predestined in Christ the Lord. – Message of His Holiness for the World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation.

The Holy Father’s latest eco-statement, issued last week in preparation for the September first World Day of Prayer for Creation, may not be what some expect. But it is exactly what it should be.

The statement grounds our eco-efforts in our faith, which should always be the foundation on which we seek to build or protect anything.

Moreover, the statement provides a sort of catechesis of what our faith proposes that is different from worldly eco-voices—and such catechesis is part and parcel of evangelization.

Why is there so much evil in the world? Why so much injustice, so many fratricidal wars that kill children, destroy cities, pollute the environment and leave mother earth violated and devastated? Implicitly evoking the sin of Adam, Saint Paul states: “We know that the whole creation has been groaning...

At a time with more access to information than any other in history, division about what is and is not true is only growing.

This has been a longtime reality for those of us engaged in climate education and advocacy. What should be a straightforward assessment of facts is often anything but. Camps arise—usually along predictable, political binary positions—which leads to heated tempers and strained relationships.

But why? How can our evolved minds, now with so much access to so much data, be so divided—so much so as to create absolutely divergent versions of reality?

Adrian Bardon, a professor at Wake Forest University, tackles these questions in his book The Truth About Denial: Bias and Self-Deception in Science, Politics, and Religion' (Oxford Univ. Press 2020), as well as in this 2020 article in The Conversation, in which he writes,

In theory, resolving factual disputes should be relatively easy: Just present strong evidence, or evidence of a strong expert consensus. This approach succeeds most of the time, when the issue is, say, the atomic weight of hydrogen.

But things don’t work that way when scientific advice presents a picture that threatens someone’s perceived interests

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