Blackwell Reference Online

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Inside my church, at every Eucharist (and in other ways at other times) practices of offering go on. These are many and various. They include the members of the congregation offering their time, their physical presence, and their attention (as far as they can manage it) to Scripture readings, sermons, liturgical words and actions, and each other. The gathered congregation offers prayers. They offer to God and one another a public declaration of repentance. They offer hands, embraces and words of greeting at the sharing of the peace. The consummate moment of offering, however, is immediately before the beginning of the eucharistic prayer, at what is often called the “offertory.” At this point, the gifts of the people (usually money) are brought up to the altar, prayed over and dedicated to God's work. And with them, bread and wine (“fruit of the earth, and the work of human hands”) are handed over to the priest to be consecrated.Outside my church, something in the order of a mass extinction of plant and animal species is underway across the globe. This is the latest of several mass extinctions in the earth's history, but it is distinctive in that an animal – Homo sapiens – is playing a key role in bringing it about. The philosopher Stephen Clark has been observing what has been going on outside my church (and outside his own) for a longer time and with more scientific knowledge than ... log in or subscribe to read full text