Michael Dowd is married to Connie Barlow, another key RN Voice, and they spent many years touring the U.S. in a van, promoting the RN orientation in hundreds of churches and other venues. He also published an important book, Thank God for Evolution, that encouraged Christian readers to adopt Everybody’s Story (which he and Connie call The Great Story) and embrace an ecomoral orientation. Their website is choc-a-block with videos, podcasts, and links to RN-oriented materials. Two links that Connie feels are particularly important: Kid’s Curricula and Death which extends beyond personal death and into civilization death and even possible human species death.
Michael brings us the ringing tones of a former evangelical minister. Here are some of his pithy quotes:
Any human being exists only as a member of the wider community of life, air, water, and soil. We have no existence apart from the living earth. We are Earth. What we do to Earth, we do to our self.
Ecology is the new theology; big history is the new Genesis. Those who fail to understand that evidence is modern-day scripture, and that the world we live in is an honorable world, betray God and humanity in the most egregious of ways.
No one sane would let a first-century dentist fill their children’s teeth. Why then do we allow first-century theologians to fill our children’s minds?
God is not a person; God is a sacred personification of one or more deeply significant dimensions of reality. If we miss this we miss everything!
The Great Story of our immense journey contains crucial lessons for guiding humanity safely through the dangers and confusions evident today. This grand epic will propel us forward in a spirit of expectant curiosity. We will place our trust not only in the Whole but also in our own species’ capacity to serve as the vessel through which the evolutionary impulse is most active at this time.