Religious Environmentalism Part 1: Fletcher Harper

Reverend Fletcher Harper is an ordained Episcopal priest and environmental activist. Since 2002 he has been the executive director of GreenFaith, an ecumenical religious organization dedicated to ecological repair and justice. Also on the show, Katy Scrogin reviews Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists.

Organized around their three core values of Spirit, Stewardship, and Justice, GreenFaith's mission is "to inspire, educate and mobilize people of diverse religious backgrounds for environmental leadership."

GreenFaith was founded in 1992 under the name Partners for Environmental Quality by Jewish and Christian leaders who believed that New Jersey ’s religious community needed an organization to connect diverse religious traditions with the environment.

Harper joined GreenFaith as their Executive Director in 2002. A graduate of Princeton University and Union Theological Seminary, he served as a parish priest for ten years and in leadership positions in the Episcopal Church before becoming GreenFaith’s Executive Director.

This is Part 1 of our two-part interview. The conclusion will air next week.

Also on the Show

Katy Scrogin reviews Kay Larson's Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists.

From the book description:
"Where the Heart Beats is the first book to address the phenomenal importance of Zen Buddhism to John Cage’s life and to the artistic avant-garde of the 1950s and 1960s. Zen’s power to transform Cage’s troubled mind—by showing him his own enlightened nature—liberated Cage from an acute personal crisis that threatened everything he most deeply cared about this life, his music, and his relationship with his life partner, Merce Cunningham. Caught in a society that rejected his art, his politics, and his sexual orientation, Cage was transformed by Zen from an overlooked and marginal musician into the absolute epicenter of the avant-garde."