Category Archives: The Cross in the Midst of Creation

Good Friday and the Sorrow and Kindness of God

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Reflecting on the Cross

The tears you shed, my sorrowful friend, are purer than the laughter of him that seeks to forget and sweeter than the mockery of the scoffer. These tears cleanse the heart of the blight of hatred, and teach man to share the pain of the brokenhearted. They are the tears of the Nazarene. ~Kahlil Gibran

Reflecting on the cross is a way of opening to the world’s suffering and to the pain and pathos of God. It carves out a space for holding a sense of God’s love and intention for the world while at the same time facing the reality of suffering, sin, and evil in the world as it is. This integrated dual focus puts things in perspective and is an antidote to being paralyzed by grief or entranced by the intrigue and drama that pass today as “the real world.”

In prayer related to the cross, I face what happened to Jesus not because of some transaction between God and humankind but because of the way he lived his life and faced death and because his living presence is still here, illuminating all who seek communion with him.

Reflecting on the crucifixion and the events leading up to Jesus’s death means not glorifying his death or absolving those responsible but remembering that he was crucified for cultivating a way of life and creating a community based on alternative values that directly challenged the values (and laws!) of the ruling powers, which, for that very reason, had him put to death. It means facing the painful story of his execution at the hands of a murderous system that included official representatives, religious collaborators, a public that could be manipulated, and friends who betrayed, denied, or abandoned him. It also brings to life the countless others who have been subjected to persecution and death over the years by similar systems of worldly power.

Reflecting on the death of Jesus and all the other unjust deaths throughout history, including today, brings us face-to-face with our complicity and our rock-bottom poverty of spirit. We may even experience what seems to be the absence of God, as Jesus did as he hung on the cross, crying out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34).

As we reflect on our own personal failings and our complicity in unjust systems, we discover our moral bankruptcy, emptiness, and powerlessness to control the outcome of events. We recognize that our wisdom and strength are inadequate to the task of personal and social transformation, so we surrender ourselves to God, whose wisdom and power are shrouded in mystery. Our ego stops trying to justify and defend itself. We die to ourselves. We enter the darkness, the depths, the journey of emptiness and loss and letting go, the dark night of the soul. Deeper, into the depths of spirit and matter, into the silence and music of the spheres, into the dark. Surrender of self, but not submission, led by the Holy Spirit, trusting the unknown, abandoning ourselves to love. Paradoxically, it is by entering this very darkness that light dawns and hope is reborn: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matt 5:3). This is an example of the via negativa, the way of nothingness. It is the Way of the Cross, which has both an inward and an outward dimension.

By prayerfully entering into communion with Jesus in his life and in his death, I indicate my desire and willingness to follow him, to live according to his values, and to risk sharing his fate. These practices enable me to accept and, through prayer, to practice my own death and release the claims of the self that keep me conformed to contemporary culture. At the same time, the biblical witness and ongoing tangible presence of the Holy Spirit assure me that death is not the end of the journey. Holding space for this story and the ongoing story of the world’s suffering brings home the painful reality of Jesus’s time and of ours. It enables us to glimpse the extent of the world’s pain and see it in the context of the compassion of God. In words from “Kindness,” a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye,

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth. Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore.

Reflecting on the cross draws us into the sorrow and kindness of God. We are saved for kindness— the only thing that makes sense anymore.

Facing death is part of what it means to be human and aware of our mortality. The ongoing cycle of life and death is integral to life as we know it here on planet earth. The resurrection of Jesus is a foretaste and a sign that death is not the end, that in some mysterious way, life goes on beyond the grave. Still, the primary focus of Christian faith is not life after death, but eternal life here and now. Life in Christ enables us to live in defiance of death, which appears not only at the end of life but also in our everyday lives: in the loss of loved ones, in communal tragedies, in injustices that diminish us, in depression, in human bondage to sin, in the death of nature. Death comes in many guises, and the powers have myriad ways to magnify and inflict death.

Those of us who have heard the gospel know that the death of Jesus is not the end of the story. Through regular reflection and prayer, we gradually adjust to the silence and spaciousness, the emptiness and fullness of God. We come to realize that even when reflecting on the crucifixion, we do so in the presence of the risen Christ, who is always with us, even when God seems absent or when we question our capacity to endure. When I enter into communion with the crucified Jesus, I also commune with the risen Christ. For, as Jesus said, “He is God not of the dead, but of the living” (Mark 12:27).

Living in Christ enables us to resist and offer life-giving alternatives to the death-dealing stratagems of the powers, as Jesus did. This is the good news of the gospel: that even when facing death, despite death, in defiance of death, God comes to us in Jesus, raising us to new life and enabling us to participate in the life of God. Such experience itself is resurrection.

Resurrection and New Creation

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“The new creation is not a different creation. It is the new creation of this deranged world. Eternal life is not a different life. It is the resurrection of this life into the life of God. . . . So the kingdom of God means that this world will be different and will be born anew out of violence and injustice to justice, righteousness and peace.”[i]                                                                                Jürgen Moltmann

After months of wind, rain, and snow, Easter Sunday was a glorious spring day, with greenery and flowers springing up all around. This Lenten blog series “Creation, Cross, and the Powers,” culminates today with me addressing the challenging question: How is the resurrection of Jesus relevant today, as we witness the deadly impacts of the domination system on our human family and the community of life? To answer this, I point to the following passage:

“So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation” (2 Cor 5:17–18). The passage makes clear that the scope of reconciliation in “[the risen] Christ” extends beyond God and the individual to all creation.

The concept of new creation has been used to illustrate a hopeful vision of renewal that may motivate people to take seriously our call to care for the earth. One way that Christians have interpreted this concept is to relate it to the afterlife, as an assurance that no matter how bad things get here on earth, no matter how many ecosystems are destroyed or how many species go extinct, God will ultimately reconstitute creation in a renewed and even better way. But such ideas bring little comfort to those of us who love life here on earth as we witness the escalating speed and efficiency of the institutional engines of death that are destroying it.

Of course, the promise of resurrection and creation’s renewal at the end of time offers us freedom from the fear of death and fosters courage to face life’s challenges. But the biblical concept of new creation does not just symbolize hope that at the end of the world, God will reconstitute it in a new form. As Moltmann said, it symbolizes hope “that this world will be different.”

It is also an invitation to live in light of the resurrection now. Living in the Spirit of the risen Christ enables us to recognize the glory of God in creation, to live in reconciled relationships, to comfort those who suffer, to stand in solidarity against oppressive powers, to allow the love that we have received to flow through us, to acknowledge that all creation exists within the circle of God’s care, and to take actions that embody hope for the future and are proportional to the challenges we face—in short: to live into the reality of the new creation.

As extinctions become more numerous, climate change accelerates, and the powers assert themselves in ever more ecologically destructive ways, the biblical concept of new creation illustrates a spiritual reality that can be experienced and lived into. As followers of Jesus, we are already part of the new creation here and now, as is made clear in the text above. We are already part of a new creation because we are in Christ.

As reconciled people who are empowered as participants in God’s saving work in our time, we are called to reach out with the message of reconciliation not only for individuals but for creation as well. This path is costly. Carrying the message of reconciliation must include challenging dehumanizing institutional idols that are undoing creation, and working for systemic change in ways that enable people to flourish. In this process, we are given a new orientation toward life and courage to rise even when faced with seemingly insurmountable odds.

God rejoices with us when we rejoice, weeps with us when we weep, showers both the just and unjust with all the blessings of creation and calls us to embody love in this world. Jesus did just that. Those of us who follow him are called to do so fully and completely, renouncing fear and paralysis, living in the power of the Spirit of the risen Christ, rising in courage, and heading straight into the heart of the struggle for a transformed world.

 

Parts of this post were excepted from “Creation Crucified: The Passion of the Earth,” the fourth chapter of The Cross in the Midst of Creation, Sharon Delgado (Fortress Press, 2022).

This is the tenth post in a Lenten Series, “Creation, Cross, and The Powers.” 

  1. Creation, Cross, and The Powers. 
  2. Extraordinary Temptations
  3. The Spirituality of an Epoch
  4. Creation: Moving from Awe to Lament to Resistance
  5. Banking on Our Future as Demythologized Exorcism
  6. Don’t Look Up
  7. Care Enough to Weep
  8. The Death of Jesus in Context
  9. Resurrection and New Creation

Follow Sharon’s blog post by signing up at the “Follow” link to the right. Share with the Social Media buttons below. See also a previous Lenten series: A Lenten Call to Resist. Check out Sharon’s books.  Contact Sharon to request a complimentary digital chapter of one of her books, to request a presentation, or to order discounted bulk copies of her books. 

 

[i] Jürgen Moltmann, Jesus Christ for Today’s World (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994), 22–23

 

 

The Death of Jesus in Context

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As we move through the story of Jesus’s death and on to resurrection, we return to the primary themes of this Lenten blog series on “Creation, Cross, and the Powers.”

This story is often told as if it all took place removed from the context of both creation and the powers. It is treated not as a story that we can relate to in terms of what is going on in the world today, but as a required dogma to keep us from being consigned to hell.  Jesus’s suffering and death is portrayed as if it was simply a transaction between God and humanity, a payment that God made to save sinners from eternal damnation. These transactional views turn Jesus into a passive and compliant victim and ignore his human agency and choice. His teachings and actions don’t enter this equation because what counts is his death.  They focus on death, not resurrection—not on his vindication by God despite the powers, or on his risen and ongoing presence among us.

But in the Gospels, this story is not told in the abstract, but in the context of both creation and the powers. Notice that creation is the context of both Jesus’s prayer and arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane and of his resurrection encounter with Mary in the garden on Easter morning.  And the story of his final confrontation with the authorities leading up to his arrest, trial, and crucifixion is one of the most political stories in the Bible (along with the Exodus story).

In these last days of Holy Week, we are invited to immerse ourselves in this story and to recognize with mind and heart what Jesus and his followers experienced during this final confrontation with the governing authorities of occupied Jerusalem. After his “triumphal entry into Jerusalem,” they went directly to the Temple. Jesus’s action of overturning the tables of the moneychangers there directly threatened the economic status quo (tribute and taxes to Rome/temple taxes to keep the system going). According to the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), that was the last straw.

When Jesus and his followers “occupied” the Temple, the elite religious leaders couldn’t arrest him because “they feared the people” (Luke 20:19, 22:2). They couldn’t disperse the people who had gathered to hear Jesus because “the whole crowd was spellbound by his teaching” (Mark 11:18). “People power” at work.

For this reason, the religious authorities had to arrest Jesus by stealth in the Garden of Gethsemane. Their problem was that the Jewish nation was under the jurisdiction of Rome—including the religious leaders, Jesus, and his followers. Only a representative of Rome could sentence Jesus to death.  That’s where Pilate came in.  Things moved on from there.

If this story is told out of context, it doesn’t make sense unless you consent to a particular dogma. But if you read it with an open mind, you can see that the words of Paul are true: “None of the rulers of this age understood [the wisdom that comes from God]. If they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of Glory.” (1 Corinthians 2:6-8). God triumphs through Jesus despite the powers, bringing light out of darkness and light out of death.

(For a fuller portrayal of the story of the events that led to Jesus’s death, see this excerpt from Chapter 5, “Jesus and the Powers,” from The Cross in the Midst of Creation.

This is the eighth post in a Lenten Series, “Creation, Cross, and The Powers.” The other posts are as folows: 

  1. Creation, Cross, and The Powers. 
  2. Extraordinary Temptations
  3. The Spirituality of an Epoch
  4. Creation: Moving from Awe to Lament to Resistance
  5. Banking on Our Future as Demythologized Exorcism
  6. Don’t Look Up
  7. Care Enough to Weep
  8. The Death of Jesus in Context
  9. Resurrection and New Creation

 

Follow Sharon’s blog post by signing up at the “Follow” link to the right. Share with the Social Media buttons below. See also a previous Lenten series: A Lenten Call to Resist. Check out Sharon’s books.  Contact Sharon to request a complimentary digital chapter of one of her books, to request a presentation, or to order discounted bulk copies of her books. 

Care Enough to Weep

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Last weekend I was on a silent retreat, sharing prayer spaces and meals with a few church friends and a larger group of Buddhists.  On Saturday I walked the Stations of the Cross at the retreat center, knowing that the next day was Palm Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week. Sometimes when I walk that path, one or another of the statues portraying the events of Jesus’s last hours overwhelms me. This time it was the first statue, the one that portrays Pilate sitting in judgement, with a child pouring water from a pitcher over Pilate’s hands as he washes them, and into the bowl beneath. It struck me that this really was the decisive moment, the official decision that set the crucifixion into motion, with all the other participants (executioner, soldiers, and the like) carrying out their assigned roles–just doing their jobs.

Grief washed over me, along with the realization that this dynamic is at the root of the harm being done to creation today, as individuals relinquish their responsibility in the face of powers that seem out of human control. Looking at that stature brought home to me how Pilate’s action of washing his hands of Jesus’s fate is exactly the cause of the extremity of the global situation we face today. I wept.

Of course, the stage for Jesus’s trial and execution had been set long before. Jesus’s passion for the reign of God and his teachings and actions to bring it about had threatened the uneasy collaboration between the Jewish religious establishment and the Roman army that occupied Jerusalem.

I will return to the story of Jesus’ trial and execution in a later post in this series. For now, let’s consider the story of Palm Sunday. Surely Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey’s colt and the people calling on him to save them and hailing him as king further antagonized the religious authorities. They saw him as a political threat to the established order of the violently enforced Pax Romana, the so-called “Roman Peace.” When the Pharisees demanded that Jesus order his followers to stop, he replied, “I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out” (Luke 19:40).

The way Luke tells the story, as they came near to Jerusalem and saw it, he wept over it. Jesus wept! He could see what was coming. He said, “If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. Indeed, the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up ramparts around you and surround you, and hem you in on every side. They will crush you to the ground, you and your children within you, and they will not leave one stone upon another because you did not recognize the time of your visitation from God” (Luke 19:41-44).

Jesus weeps because he can foresee the terrible things will befall the people of Jerusalem and their descendants. This destruction is not God’s will, but is the result of people not recognizing God’s presence among them or “the things that make for peace.”

Jesus weeps. As we look at creation’s dilemma today, which is also our dilemma since we are part of creation, we also have reason to weep. According to climate scientists, (in many ways the today’s prophets), we can see that the terrifying consequences of industrialized civilization are already upon us and are coming at ever greater degrees of magnitude for future generations. Who are our “enemies”? According to Ephesians 6:12, “our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.”  In other words, against the powers and principalities.

Like the Pax Romana, Pax Americana will not bring us “the things that make for peace,” for it is also ultimately enforced through violence, including racial, gender, and economic violence. Today’s corporate-dominated global capitalist system is also enforced by multiple modes of violence. It is incapable of protecting us from the certain ecological consequences of our current way of life, which are essentially locked in by our interlocking network  of global institutions, unless we discern “the things that make for peace” and perceive where God is at work in our world. Only then will we be able to discern what steps we might take to avert disaster.

What can we do? When William Stringfellow was asked this question, he said, “If you want to do something, the most practical thing I can tell you is: weep.  First of all, care enough to weep.”[i]

Like Jesus, we can weep.

This is the seventh post in a Lenten Series, “Creation, Cross, and The Powers.” The other posts are as follows: 

  1. Creation, Cross, and The Powers. 
  2. Extraordinary Temptations
  3. The Spirituality of an Epoch
  4. Creation: Moving from Awe to Lament to Resistance
  5. Banking on Our Future as Demythologized Exorcism
  6. Don’t Look Up
  7. Care Enough to Weep
  8. The Death of Jesus in Context
  9. Resurrection and New Creation

Follow Sharon’s blog post by signing up at the “Follow” link to the right. Share with the Social Media buttons below. See also a previous Lenten series: A Lenten Call to Resist. Check out Sharon’s books.  Contact Sharon to request a complimentary digital chapter of one of her books, to request a presentation, or to order discounted bulk copies of her books. 

 

 

[i] William Stringfellow: Essential Writings, Bill Wylie-Kellerman, editor (Fortress Press, 2013)),  page 180.

Don’t Look Up

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“You will indeed listen, but never understand, and you will indeed look, but never perceive. For this people’s heart has grown dull, and their ears are hard of hearing, and they have shut their eyes; so that they might not look with their eyes, and listen with their ears, and understand with their heart, and turn—and I would heal them.”                                     Matthew 13 14-15

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently released its Synthesis Report of its sixth assessment (AR6)[i] It should have been at the top of the news everywhere, but it was not. The constant barrage of attention-grabbing news headlines with violent, distressing, or random content makes it almost impossible to grasp what’s most important. It makes it hard to “see the forest for the trees.” But if the forest is dying there will be no trees, as is happening here in the Zombie forests[ii] of California, due of course, to climate change.

In the movie “Don’t Look Up,” filmmaker Adam McKay uses the metaphor of a world-destroying comet to parody how policy-makers and the media downplay the imminent threat of climate catastrophe. Jennifer Lawrence plays a doctoral student who discovers a massive comet headed straight for Earth, and Leo Di Caprio plays the scientist who confirms her discovery. Together they do everything they can to awaken people to the threat. The response of the US president, played brilliantly by Meryl Streep, is to “sit tight and assess,” and finally to support a billionaire entrepreneur’s high-tech (market based) money-making scheme. They go directly to the press but the talk show host, played by Cate Blanchett, ignores the danger, trivializes the topic, and dismisses the Jennifer Lawrence character for desperately sounding the alarm.

Film maker Adam McKay describes his motivation for producing “Don’t Look Up” by pointing back through geological time to the asteroid that many scientists say is responsible for wiping out the dinosaurs and many other species.  He says, “[Climate change] is the biggest story in human history, and arguably the biggest threat since the Chicxulub comet 66 million years ago.”[iii]

Is this an exaggeration? Climate scientists today are sounding the alarm.  According to the IPCC’s AR6 report:

“Human-caused climate change is already affecting many weather and climate extremes in every region across the globe. This has led to widespread adverse impacts and related losses and damages to nature and people. Vulnerable communities that have historically contributed the least to current climate change are disproportionately affected.”[iv]

“In this decade, accelerated action to adapt to climate change is essential to close the gap between existing adaptation and what is needed…Emissions should be decreasing by now and will need to be cut by almost half by 2030, if warming is to be limited to 1.5°C. [v]

According the IPCC’s press release, “There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future for all…The choices and actions implemented in this decade will have impacts now and for thousands of years.”[vi]

Last November, in his opening plenary remarks at COP 27 in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterrez summed up our situation: “The clock is ticking. We are in the fight of our lives, and we are losing. Greenhouse gas emissions keep growing, global temperatures keep rising, and our planet is fast approaching tipping points that will make climate chaos irreversible.” He added, ‘We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator.”[vii]

Many of us in the global North are privileged enough to be able to find ways to insulate ourselves (temporarily) from the reality and impacts of climate change on our lives and hope that the fires and floods don’t come for us. We might tell ourselves that there’s nothing that we can do, or we might feel we are doing our part because we recycle or don’t fly or are vegan or have an electric car, or we might hold out hope for the next technological fix or the next billionaire entrepreneur to save us.  But these responses are inadequate in light of the existential threat we face. These are all forms of denial, because they enable us to pretend that life will continue go on as is has before. They are ways of saying, “Don’t look up.”

In many parts of the world, people don’t have that luxury, because extreme weather is destroying their homes, their crops, their livelihoods, and even their very existence as a people (as with island nations).  Our young know that climate change is upon us and accelerating, and that they and their descendants will disproportionately bear its escalating burdens long after those who have presided over the current fossil-fuel intensive global system are gone.

Clearly, powers very much like the dominating powers of Jesus’s age, continue their death-dealing work today. Creation itself is being crucified. As William Stringfellow said, “The work of the powers in the Fall is the undoing of creation.” This becomes ever-harder to ignore as temperatures rise, weather extremes multiply, and ecosystems that sustain life are progressively unraveled, putting an ever-greater strain on our corporate-dominated capitalist global empire, leading to rising epidemics of poverty, violence, and misery.

This post is an invitation and a challenge to readers to come out of denial and face the extremity of our situation. The season of Lent is a fitting time for this, for it is God in Christ, immanent as well as transcendent, who suffers in and through us and all creation. We are approaching Holy Week, and we know that Easter is coming. Yet we cannot bypass the cross to get to resurrection.

As we walk with Jesus through the painful events that led to his death, in retrospect we can see, like the Gospel writers, God’s divine presence and providence in these events. But it’s important to look at these events in context, for it was not God but the rulers of his age who “crucified the Lord of glory” (1 Cor 2:8). In other words, it was the dominating powers of his day—the Roman Empire and the elite religious establishment that collaborated with the Roman occupation of Jerusalem who found Jesus to be subverting the existing establishment.  For that, he was killed.

In An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land, William Stringfellow speaks of the moral impoverishment  that afflicts us as we relinquish our human responsiblility to the powers. He says, “I mean by `moral impoverishment’ what the Bible often cites as hardness of the heart” or as the impairment or loss of moral discernment; the incapacity to hear, though one has ears; or to see, though one has eyes… I refer, thus, not so much to an evil mind as to a paralyzed onscience; not so much to either personal or corporate immorality as to a social pathology possessing persons and institutions; not so much to malevolence, however incarnate, as to the literla demoralization of human life in society.” It is not so much that there are evil people running things, but that things are running on automatic according to the institutional imperatives in a global system that is working against life. “Don’t look up,” encouraged by the dominating powers that benefit from the current system, is a way to avoid facing the truth or feeling the need to respond.

As people of faith and followers of Jesus, how do we collaborate with the rulers of this age, that is, the interlocking network of institutional powers that makes up today’s global empire? How can we withdraw our support?

First, we must open our eyes and look up—to see what the scientists are showing us. We must open our ears and hear the cries of people suffering on the front lines of climate change. We must open our hearts to understand, process, and grieve what is at stake:  the integrity and continuation of the interdependent community of life that has evolved here on Earth, life as we have known it, the creation that God calls “good.”

Second, we must recognize that the damage being done to creation is not the result of natural evolution or human history. Rather, it is the result of policies developed by wealthy and powerful individuals and the dominant institutions of our time, supported by those of us who tolerate and accept this system. We can break out of this complicity by naming, unmasking (exposing), and engaging these powers and by pointing in a new and life-sustaining way of being in the world.

Third, even as we reflect on and grieve the painful realities of our time, Christ’s risen Spirit is alive and active in our world today on behalf of life, and as we experience and recognize that activity we are invited to participate. The global movement for climate justice is one such expression of the Spirit’s power.  Bill McKibben said, “The best way to counter organized money is with organized people.” People who have the courage to look up.

This is the sixth post in a Lenten Series, “Creation, Cross, and The Powers.” The other posts are as follows:

  1. Creation, Cross, and The Powers. 
  2. Extraordinary Temptations
  3. The Spirituality of an Epoch
  4. Creation: Moving from Awe to Lament to Resistance
  5. Banking on Our Future as Demythologized Exorcism
  6. Don’t Look Up
  7. Care Enough to Weep
  8. The Death of Jesus in Context
  9. Resurrection and New Creation

Follow Sharon’s blog post by signing up at the “Follow” link to the right. Share with the Social Media buttons below. See also a previous Lenten series: A Lenten Call to Resist. Check out Sharon’s books.  Contact Sharon to request a complimentary digital chapter of one of her books, to request a presentation, or to order discounted bulk copies of her books. 

 [i] “AR6 Synthesis Report, Climate Change, 2023,” Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/

[ii] “Mapping California’s ‘Zombie’ Forests,” Elena Shao, New York Times, March 6, 2023,

[iii] “Climate Scientist and Netflix ‘Don’t Look Up’ director talk comet metaphors and global warming,” Elizabeth Howell, Space.com, May 11, 2022,  https://www.space.com/dont-look-up-climate-change-comet-metaphore-scientist-praise

[iv]  “Synthesis Report of the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report,” Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, March 20, 2023,