It was a great honor to be recently invited as an official observer to a conference convened by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences at the Vatican in Rome. Ever since Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical Laudato si’ (also known as On Care for Our Common Home), the Vatican has been providing moral leadership in shaping global Christian response to the intensifying threats to a safe and sustainable planet—threats created largely by human activity and choices.
Our dear, sweet Dad, James Taylor Scorgie, passed away on March 8, 2017 in Kelowna, British Columbia. He was 90 years old. As he breathed his last, I had the privilege of whispering in his ear the sacred words “I have fought the good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith . . .” and then he was gone.
Dad was born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, in 1926—during a blizzard, as he always reminded us. He grew up in the East York neighborhood of Toronto, went off to Moody Bible Institute in Chicago in the 1940s, fell in love with and married our mother, and embarked on his first calling as a minister of a number of churches in British Columbia, Ontario and Saskatchewan. Dad considered it one of the great privileges of his life to have been personally mentored by the renowned Christian mystic A. W. Tozer. During the second half of his career, he worked in the employment and immigration sector of the Canadian government. Then, in the late 1980s, at the onset of retirement, he and Mom moved all the way out to Kelowna, British Columbia and with considerable courage launched a whole new life there. They excelled at hospitality. Then, after Mom died in 1999, Dad found a comforting pathway forward with another life companion in the gracious person of Rita Beitel.
Back in 1962 Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring, a book that exposed the ominous silence caused by the dearth of songbirds returning to northern climes in the Spring. Her book exposed the toxic effects of DDT on all kinds of fragile life forms, and in doing so sensitized the conscience of the nation toward our environmental peril and responsibility. Today we are experiencing another kind of silent Spring, but one that is equally ominous. It is the silence of evangelicals concerning the egregious character and conduct of the president of the United States. It is as if evangelicals have suddenly lost their capacity for moral outrage, lost touch with their purported allegiance to biblical values and virtues.
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