Saturday, May 5, 2018

A Favorite Quotation

This must be one of my favorite quotations, because I've used or cited it in about four of my writings. “In a profound sense, Psalm 104 puts us humans in our place---with springs and hills and trees and creating things. If our motivation for facing our own future and the future of the earth were to glorify God, we might even have the humility to ask ourselves what it would really mean to live in partnership with a tree or with a wild goat or with the thousands of species whose disappearance causes hardly a ripple of attention, primarily because we are convinced the nature exists to serve humanity. Quite simply, Psalm 104 asserts that this is not the case. Rather, to serve God will mean ultimately to serve God’s creation…” (J. Clinton McCann, Jr., “The Book of Psalms,” in The New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. IV (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996) 1099-1100).