**2. Crises**

Crises are turning points or moments when forces meet, facing people and other beings with critical decisions that will shape the future. They are often associated with dramatic or disastrous moments, but the term is also broad. Crises exist in daily lives when people live detached from God's creation and from communion with other people and trees and soil. Crises appear when people face choices whether to continue their customary life patterns or consider alternative ways of relating with the earth, with other creatures, and with themselves. These daily crises (often unrecognized) are connected with catastrophic ones. The catastrophic crisis of climate change was set in motion by countless decisions made in everyday life over countless years to suck life from the planet for human gain and without regard for the life of the planet and all that lives on it. Likewise, the catastrophic plight of indigenous peoples in North America did not emerge in one traumatic moment, but in millions of traumatizing acts of war and murder; kidnapping and enslavement;

colonialization; displacement; broken treaties; and destruction of lands rich with fish, clean water, plants, soil, and game.

Crisis moments often go unnoticed without conscious reflection, especially when they are part of prevailing life patterns and worldviews that are taken for granted; ye<sup>t</sup> people make small and large decisions to act in certain ways, which affect both the immediate and long future. Consider how theories of individual autonomy and individual well-being, taken for granted in most Western Christian cultures, have conflicted with indigenous theories of relationality and communal–ecological well-being, leading to the overtaking of land for individual gain or the economic gain of industrialists. These actions can be cataclysmic over time, creating and reinforcing patterns of injustice that destroy peoples, cultures, and the earth. The actions often appear innocuous at first, but the narratives of European settlements in North America reveal how settler communities, individuals, churches, and state/provincial and federal governments have contributed to the amassing of injustice toward indigenous peoples and toward the earth.

Beneath these actions are theologies or worldviews that generate and reinforce the actions. The interplay of practices and worldviews reveals the dynamic of what Don Browning describes as theory-laden practice and practice-laden theory, as well as "traditionsaturated ideals and practices" (Browning 1991, pp. 5–7, 10–12, 45–49). For him, any ethical or theological question needs to be explored with these complex relationships in mind: theory, practice, and tradition. I add poesis to this list to acknowledge the role of creativity and beauty.

Whether far-reaching or small and local, crises were turning points for European settlers in North America as they made daily judgments and decisions: how best to live in this land; whether and where to clear forests for farming; how to keep their people "safe" from peoples they feared or considered less than themselves; how to establish Christianity in this land; or how to ensure control over land, water, and peoples different from themselves. The decision points took many forms. They were *habitual*, continuing engrained patterns; *anticipatory*, seeking to build or protect a future; and/or *reactive* to immediate situations. All of these together have brought the world to a point of catastrophe.

Practical theology is by nature a discipline of crisis, standing on the edge of reality and potential, what is and what can be. The multiple meanings of crisis are all relevant in this geological age of the Anthropocene in which human agency is the dominant determinant of the fate of the climate and earth. Crisis can be understood as a troubling situation, a moment for decision-making, and/or a moment in which a bad situation is likely to become markedly worse or better. Within macro-crises are also micro-occasions or events described in process-relational theologies in which the objective past and habits of being are met with God's initial aim and the potential of a new decision. An emerging event, through its subjective aim, sets a direction and a new occasion is formed, only to be followed by billions of others. This micro process also takes place in more complex organisms as a fox or forest or human being, as they carry their respective pasts, relationships, and accumulated wisdom into a new moment of time, making a new decision for this moment. The decisions may be repetitive of the immediate and dominant streams of the past, or they may move in novel directions. I propose that we recognize all these decision moments as crises, each representing change (however small or large) and each revealing the necessity, foreboding, and hope for change.

The challenge is for practical theologians to attend even more intentionally to the dynamics of change, building on current movements. For example, practical theologians regularly respond to habituated practices with *proactive responses*, encouraging people to examine their habitual patterns for the sake of comprehending, critiquing, and reshaping or reinforcing them. Consider the work of public practical theologians, cultural analysts, pastoral counselors and caregivers, educators, and homileticians. Climate crisis underscores the need for these same theologians to reflect on engrained habits that have contributed to ecological crises, and the habits that are needed to prevent further destruction in the future. Closely related, practical theologians also engage crises with *anticipatory responses*,

analyzing historical and contemporary trajectories of practice (e.g., practices of destructive human relationships or ecological neglect) and anticipating alternative futures. Finally, practical theologians often offer *reactive responses*, addressing threats of disaster, analyzing actions and underlying causes, and posing immediate responses to large-scale threats. In this Anthropocene age, all three responses are needed, as they flow in and out of one another and often take place simultaneously.

Practical theologians have largely focused on crises in the individual and community lives of human beings, but the time has come when that focus needs to be amplified with sustained attention to *all* the natural world and to ecological crises, seeking to protect and regenerate a threatened planet. What is tragically clear in the global climate crisis is that reactive responses are urgent, but the necessity for proactive and anticipatory responses is clear as well. Urgency cannot turn people away from the important work of proactivity and anticipatory action, as it often does. In all this work, practical theologians have an important role to play with their specialized attention to theory-laden practice, practice-laden theory, and tradition-saturated ideals and practices. To play that role requires that we attend to the relationship of practical wisdom and life practices.

#### **3. Practical Wisdom: Reshaping Theology, Worldviews, and Relational Patterns**

One of the profound challenges for addressing climate crises is the inadequacy of dominant theologies and world views, intertwined with inadequate relational patterns, as in colonial structures, patterns of dominance of some people over others, emphases on individualism and progress, and the dominance of humans over the land and sea. A prime example is the anthropocentricism of most Christian theologies, focusing on the superiority of humans over all other life forms, the salvation of human beings without reference to other beings, and the accompanying idea that the nonhuman natural world is a resource for humans to use and enjoy, or to tend as an inferior "other." Such views are often intensified in their ecological effects by elitist social structures in which individuals, social groups, and companies with the most economic and political power determine the "uses" of the eco-system and the limits to its protection. In anthropocentric, hierarchical worldviews, the flourishing of the planet is set aside, and the world's complex patterns of mutuality and interdependence go unrecognized. Such views lead to environmental strategies based on what appears best for people (or for people with power) without regard to the value of other beings, like animals, plants, and bodies of water.

What is needed is a deeper engagemen<sup>t</sup> with practical wisdom (or *phronesis*), or *deeper understandings of the world as formed in the process of living, relating, and reflecting over time*. Phronesis is a word with a complex of meanings. Different translations of Aristotle's *phronesis* highlight different emphases, most prominently practical wisdom, practical reason, practical virtue, prudence, or moral understanding. Each of these has unique nuances, but each represents a large view of the world. In my effort to capture the full-bodied, guiding force of phronesis, I use the term *practical wisdom*, which is shaped by relationships, practices, worldviews, and moral understandings. It thus includes a capacity to discern common good or ethical futures, and to discern pathways toward goodness. When practical theologians attend to crises of climate change, the turn to practical wisdom is critical—attending to practice and reflection on practice, to moral issues in the practices, and to the potential of alternative futures and actions that contribute to those futures.

The turn to *phronesis* is not new to practical theology. We see it in Don Browning, who emphasizes practical reasoning in the tradition of Aristotle and many later philosophers, recognizing the interpenetrating relationship between philosophies, theologies, and worldviews and the practices of human beings. Bernard Lee and Thomas Groome also accent phronesis, but with emphases on future good and ethical action toward that good. I stand more in the tradition of Lee and Groome, but I also accent the fullness of knowing through all the senses and with all one's being, a view more closely aligned with Jennifer Ayres (Ayres 2013, pp. 37–38). Such holistic knowing is vital as people question and transform

theologies and worldviews to reflect more fully on God–world relationships and evoke visions of ecological justice.

My working definition of practical wisdom is the embodied, accumulating knowledge and ethical insight that arise from human and creaturely experience of the world and the numinous. Note that I include the experience of both humans and other creatures, thus recognizing that trees and grasses and animals and people are knowing creatures, albeit in diverse ways, and they have capacities to communicate with one another. Further, all beings have multiple ways of relating with the earth—through senses and sensors, fact-gathering, intuitive or instinctive impulses, esthetic experience, and analysis. Both human and earth knowledge accumulate over time, and values are inherent in the knowing, e.g., the value of preserving life. For humans, practical wisdom is never complete, and it is never without ethical influence. It is a way of knowing and being in the world, and is critically important if we are to understand and respond well to the climate crisis.
