Loading...Beth Bojarski, the diocesan youth coordinator and summer camp director, is about to become a published author with her first book, "To Serve and Guard the Earth."
The book, which offers a six-week curriculum on the first story of creation in Genesis, is being published in May by Morehouse Education Resources, a subsidiary of Church Publishing.
Publication was not something she sought. A 2008 graduate of Virginia Theological Seminary, she was contacted last Fall about publishing the book after one of her master's thesis advisors, who she said "is heavily involved in curriculum development," sent Morehouse a copy of her master's thesis.
The book, which condenses the seven days of creation to fit a six-week course, looks at the biblical, theological and environmental connections within the story. For each class, she has created a four- to six-page handout that has participants consider each of those connections as they progress through the creation story, and she has designed activities to be done outside of class to deepen their involvement through prayer, local study and developing ideas for change that will lessen our impact on the environment.
"For example, the last session is about two things: refrain and rest per the seventh day of creation," she said. For rest, one activity invites participants to journal or draw or take digital photography (or look at a picture) of something natural for reflection and sharing.
Another activity is based on the refrain in the creation story-"At the end of each day, God said, 'This is good,' and on the last day, God said, 'This is very good.'" Refrains naturally occur in our lives, and they are to be recognized "as things of beauty and not things of annoyance," she said. To encourage this, the curriculum includes an activity that draws upon quotations from Kathleen Norris's book The Quotidian Mystery and invites students to reflect on refrains such as housework that punctuate their lives. "Certainly liturgy is a beautiful refrain both in and of itself and in our weekly lives," she noted. The exercise, she added, has participants considering how those refrains "keep us in check with who we are as part of God's creation and how God is intertwined in our life."
With her first master's degree in outdoor recreation and her focus on environmental theology at seminary, Bojarksi is particularly pleased that the book will be an online, downloadable publication, which, she said proudly, means it will save paper and cost. In addition, downloadable documents "make it easier to reproduce handouts," she said. "I think it's really wonderful."
