Freedom Loves Company

What do palm fronds, statues of Ganesh, and eagle feathers all have in common? They are religious objects that pose a challenge for the environment. Jay Wexler is a professor at the Boston University School of Law. He specializes in environmental law and church/state issues. His latest book is When God Isn't Green: A World-Wide Journey to Places Where Religious Practice and Environmentalism Collide. With humor and a hope for raising consciousness and finding balance, he makes the case for continuing the conversation between the needs of religious and environmental communities.

Tom Krattenmaker is a writer specializing in religion in public life. He is the author of "Onward Christian Athletes" and "The Evangelicals You Don’t Know." Formerly of Portland, he is now communications director at Yale Divinity School. He is not a believer in God or the supernatural. But he digs Jesus. In his latest book, "Confessions of a Secular Jesus Follower," he talks about Jesus as a resource for those who don t have religious beliefs.

John Van Hagen is a licensed psychologist with 30 years experience in a variety of clinical, training, and teaching positions. In his book Rescuing Religion: How Faith Can Survive Its Encounter With Science, he offers a way to retain a connection to biblical stories even if the characters never existed and the events never happened. We can go behind the texts to discover the struggles the authors of these texts faced. We find they connect with our own.

Twenty-five percent of all the people incarcerated in the world are in America's prisons. 60% of those are people of color. America is a "carceral state." Taking on "Lockdown America" a triad of "police violence, mass incarceration and the death penalty" Mark Lewis Taylor, the Maxwell M. Upson Professor of Theology and Culture at Princeton Theological Seminary, has written a second edition to The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America. Taylor finds in the symbol, "The Executed God" a "power in and of the people" to resist the state theatrics of terror with a counter theatrics to terror in three parts: "cultivating adversarial politics, creating dramatic actions, and catalyzing social movements."

Sue Monk Kidd has written several novels including The Secret Life of Bees, The Mermaid Chair, and The Invention of Wings. Before the novels was the story of Sue Monk Kidd’s own journey, the Dance of the Dissident Daughter: A Woman’s Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine. The 20th anniversary edition of the Dance of the Dissident Daughter has just been released. She discusses how that book shaped her novels, the quest for the Sacred Feminine, her relationship with organized religion, the effect Dance of the Dissident Daughter has had on her readers over the past 20 years, “holy misogyny,” and the grief and corresponding responsive action regarding the election.