Grounding: Ecology, Faith, Hope conference in Ontario, May 25-26

Grounding: Ecology, Faith, Hope conference in Ontario, May 25-26

WD Editors

Watershed discipleship artist and theologian Bob Haverluck will be the artist-in-residence and keynote speaker at the upcoming conference Grounding: Ecology, Faith, Hope in Bracebridge, Ontario May 25-26, 2018, at Bracebridge United Church. All are invited to attend. This conference follows the Muskoka Summit on the Environment (May 24-25). You can attend both (total $200), or one or the other. (See below for examples of Bob’s art.)

About Grounding: Ecology, Faith, Hope:

Come join others who are excited to explore strategies for sustaining hope while responding to our planet’s ecological crisis. Come, and have your own hope rekindled. Through art, music, keynote speakers, worship, and workshops we’ll create a “commons” for sharing positive ideas, stories, and religious imaginations that generate visions of the future far more hopeful than the brutal post-apocalypse scenarios painted by much of popular culture. This event will nourish our religious imagination. But not in a way that devalues environmental science.

An exhibition of 35 pieces of Bob Haverluck’s art will be on display during both conferences. He will be present at the exhibition at 6:30pm on Friday, May 25, and his keynote address will also occur that evening.

Bob’s art graces several pages on the watershed discipleship website, and a book of his art is called When God was Flesh and Wild: Stories in Defense of the Earth (2017).

Here is a little bit more about Bob and his art, and some examples of the pieces that will be in the Grounding exhibition.

At times whimsical, at times satiric, ever playful, Bob Haverluck’s comic art engages the violence against the watery earth and her creatures. As well, his drawings unfold the adventures of those who love-labour for the watery earth and the creatures. They unfold the activists’ inevitable sadness, anger, fear and weariness. As well, many are the depictions of the delight and gratitude for life inseparable from the wild bush garden of this place. Haverluck has been artist-in-residence for several year-long projects using the arts to help attend to the wellbeing of the earth with eyes to urban no less than countryside contexts. Projects included: “City of Trees, World of Trees”;  Arts of Water” and “The Talking Water Project.”

“Advice to self #2: Give your swollen self a smooch goodbye and hike your wee self to the marsh. Look with love and you will see what mere seeing cannot see. Behold who is holding you and to whom you are beholden. As you sing your thank yous with tickle grass, tie yourself to wetland willow or frog for you like them are treatied to water, earth and morning air.” ©Bob Haverluck, used by permission.
“Isn’t it time to have a little talk with the adults about the birds and the bees and the herbicides, pesticides, suicide?” ©Bob Haverluck, used by permission
“Advice to self #3: Because your eyes have seen forests ripped from the Earth, seen the sorrows of rivers, destruction of the animals, your eyes have become wounds. They need to weep, cry out Earth’s sorrow, cry out for Earth’s mending.” ©Bob Haverluck, used by permission