Robert Greer Cohn

    Global warming is, no doubt, a physical fact and we may be able to do little about it, as some leading climatologists aver, but the spiritual fact of global freezing of heart is far more threatening, and that is in human power to reverse.
    It’s called rebirth—resurrection—and we celebrate it every year on Passover/Easter, when spring light rises toward summer ripeness.  The pagan physicality of nature is at one with childish faith in the grassy Easter baskets we brought home from kindergarten, with glowing jelly beans and a semblance of bunny, and the grown-up sacred faith of Jews and Christians was originally (and remains the same) at one in the Last Supper, a Pesach Seder celebrating the escape from death-like slavery in Egypt together with a fresh version of it delivering us from evil with a renascent impulse to live.
    Mary, Jesus, Paul were nothing if not Judeo-Christians.  Foolish, selfish bigots denied the union and continuity and still do.  There are fierce new attacks on faith itself on all sides, and widespread evasions of reality in ingenious, arrogant gadget-ridden electronic and ideologized modernity, a worse inner danger than rampaging Islam externally.  The global warming campaign is itself part of the evasion, diverting us from the solemn double duty of facing the enemy within and without.  “The devil has power to assume a pleasing shape.”  But “a little child shall lead us.”