Greening the Children of God

“‘No child outdoors’ is a sad trend in modern society, but Rimmer shows an exit blazed by Thomas Traherne, an early-modern thinker who traced God’s love throughout creation. Where others settled for mind against matter, and science against faith, Traherne saw nature and grace to be interrelated in empirical details, and keyed on wonder in moral formation. Readers disheartened by the environmental crisis may find in Greening the Children of God a map to hope.”


—Gilson Waldkoenig, United Lutheran Seminary





“In this lucidly written book Chad Rimmer makes a superb case for the ethical imperative to reconnect children with the natural world both for their own wellbeing and as the way to recover a multigenerational sense of responsibility for Earth and her threatened habitats and species. This book is impressively interdisciplinary combining an illuminating new reading of the Anglican spiritual writings of Thomas Traherne and revealing an eco-phenomenological depth to his writing for the first time, while also engaging the latest insights from child and developmental psychology and long-established principles of moral psychology on the formation of moral character. It turns out that the way to redeem nature from the currently destructive trajectory of industrial civilization involves the redemption of children and adults from the modern pathologies of individualism, consumerism, and competitive stress—by getting outside and being outside, and especially in forests and gardens, by water or in mountains. Humans cannot ‘save’ the earth unless they learn their need of Earth and her creatures to save them!”


—Professor Michael Northcott, Universitas Gadjah Mada, Indonesia