“Song is more than lament and consolation; it is inspiration. Song bears the human spirit at its most expressive and expansive. This time, however, the song we sing must learn humbly and deeply from the changing Earth we inhabit. Its melodies and harmonies must be Earth-oriented in ways matched to our sober responsibility for a contracting planet in jeopardy at human hands. We are not onlookers or audience this time, guilty or innocent bystanders. We are, like jazz singers and instrumentalists, both composers and performers, invited to execute our greatest work.
That greatest work is effecting the hard transition from a time of, on balance, a destructive human presence on the planet to a time of mutual enhancement in the community of life.”
(From Rasmussen, Larry L. Earth-honoring Faith: Religious Ethics in a New Key. New York: Oxford UP, 2013. 7-8.)