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Hey @ASFS_org/ @afhvs_org conference goers! Today I’m sharing about the ChurchLands Initiative: “Dying churches, Lively Soil: Prefiguring an Antiracist, Decolonial Soil Care Ethic for the Episcopal Church” Keywords: soil care, creation care, food & faith, #landback #foodstudies20
My name is Emma Lietz Bilecky, and I’m a fellow @ptseminary. I am interested in land use, land loss, food & environmental justice and study #foodandfaith. I grow food and soil @TheFarminary. I work with @Nurya @Plainsong_Farm on #ChurchLands, too. #foodstudies20
For several decades, religious communities expressing environmental concern and advocates promoting environmental behaviors have been talking about about “Creation Care,” a non-polarizing term for everything from energy efficiency improvements to church gardens. #foodstudies2020
The Creation Care framework has limitations. Universalizing & intangible—what counts as “Creation”? how ought we to care?—it maintains a hierarchy of being with human “stewards” at the top, obscuring more-than-human agencies with a fictive “dominion” (White 1969). #foodstudies20
The #FoodandFaith (F&F) movement responds to some of these limitations–attentive to the environmental impacts of food choices, but also to the food cultures, liturgical and political contexts in which eating takes place (see Vanderslice 2019). #foodstudies20
Today’s F&F conversations include, but also depart from a focus on emergency food—one of the pillars of the US’ waste-driven capitalist food system which dispenses “toxic charity” to ameliorate its economic and ecological violence (Poppendieck 1999, Fisher 2018). #foodstudies20
F&F conversations reframe urgent food access problems through systemic recontextualization: upsetting the politics of food insecurity and the neoliberal, Weberian “hard work” ethic which holds individuals accountable for their suffering (de Souza 2019). #foodstudies20
The F&F “movement” is heterogenous—w/ many frames & strategies (Jones 2020) for ecological “stewardship,” closing the racial health/wealth gap via collective self-determination ( @BlackChurchFSN, White 2019), & church renewal in aging, shrinking congregations. #foodstudies20
The #ChurchLands initiative weaves stewardship, antiracism and church renewal together–reflecting and responding to @PBCurry ‘s triennium goals—Evangelism, Racial Reconciliation & Creation Care—by considering historic and contemporary church-owned land use. #foodstudies20
#ChurchLands wants to know just how much land—presently unknown—@theEpiscopalChurch owns nationally. The @episcopalchurch (TEC) has been amassing land on Turtle Island since at least 1705, when Queen Anne made a 215-acre land grant to @TrinityWallSt. #foodstudies20
ChurchLands represents a spatial turn for F&F and Creation Care—making room to consider the Episcopal Church’s territorial modalities, de- and reterritorializations (Hervieu-Léger 2008) and imagine more-than-human “pastoral” ministries. #foodstudies20
The ChurchLands pilot cohort asks: “How do we treat soil communities as members of our congregations? What responsibilities would that entail?” “How has church-owned land upheld white supremacy, and how might land be involved in the work of racial justice?” #foodstudies20
Reimagining the Church’s role in making and caring for soils, participants become members of soil communities (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017, Richter & Yaalon 2011) rather than merely stewards managing land assets. #foodstudies20
One tricky question remains: How can these churches repent of their historic entanglements in US settler colonialism and indigenous cultural genocide—via the #DoctrineofDiscovery & missionary boarding schools—on stolen land and in segregated churches? #foodstudies20
TEC has repudiated the #doctrineofdiscovery but taken little substantive action so far (c.f. see “Triangle of Hope”). #foodstudies20
On positionality: I’m a TEC member & do not advocate its abolition, but I take seriously the ways in which “land as commodity” (Kimmerer 2013) & land’s financialization (Fairbairn 2014) has shaped TEC’s social, environmental & religious imagination (Jennings 2010). #foodstudies20
I’m afraid this imagination remains intact. Enlisting the “microbial labor” of soil (Krzywoszynska 2020,
@Anna_K_speaking) to “save the (dying) Church” follows a precedent wherein an institution w/ deep imperialist ties commodifies land in
reproductive service. #foodstudies20
@Anna_K_speaking) to “save the (dying) Church” follows a precedent wherein an institution w/ deep imperialist ties commodifies land in
reproductive service. #foodstudies20
This time, soil labor is commodified to maintain “relevance” with younger generations (read: hipsters and foodies) or more cynically, TEC’s pension fund. #foodstudies20
Can soil’s relational materiality (Krzywoszynska 2019) transform TEC instead? Like in decomposition, soil transformations are mutually constitutive. Even as we notice our terraformations, we become food for each other—made, unmade and remade through soil food webs. #foodstudies20
In this context, TEC’s recognizable survival is certainly not inevitable, but its ongoingness within a wider ecology is. #foodstudies20
Within a blasted ecclesial landscape, TEC is beginning to recognize how its institutional land ownership practices have disturbed and remade worlds through the “contamination” of encounter (Tsing 2015) both to life-giving and to biologically destructive ends. #foodstudies20
Will this “back to the land” moment—which seeks to address environmental racism and creation care at once—lead the Church all the way to #landback? #foodstudies20
As church shutterings accelerate in the wake of COVID19, will TEC’s decision-making processes reflect & affirm that Creation is not primarily a financial asset, but a living community whose fate also matters? #foodstudies20
Jesus said, “Whosoever seeks to save their life will lose it; and whosoever loses their life shall preserve it” (Lk 17:33) — This land is alive! #foodstudies20
