You Are Viewing 11th Hour

The 11th Hour was honored by the International Visual Communications Association….

Date: 13/11/07

Source: leonardodicaprio.com

One recent Sunday morning, a parish priest stopped to ask about Al Gore and the validity of his film, An Inconvenient Truth.

“Steve,” the priest said, “I hear Al Gore is just jumping on the eco-bandwagon and that he is trying to capitalize on current interest in the environment.”

I explained that Gore had presented testimony in the U.S. Senate on climate change back in the 1980s and dealt extensively with the issue in 1992 with his book, Earth in the Balance.

“I also heard that the science in the film is flawed,” the priest continued. I replied that it had, in essence, been confirmed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the consensus of thousands of climatologists.

He then paused, looked me in the eye, and said, “This is a serious moral issue. How could we in the church have missed this?” I could hear the scales from his eyes cascading onto the church steps.

The priest’s question is both timely and unsettling, for it illustrates that the professional standard bearers of religious traditions are often among the most visually impaired when it comes to discerning the main moral issues of one’s time.

Reinhold Niebuhr, the celebrated U.S. Christian theologian, made this point compellingly. Reflecting on the “corrupted religious life” of Christian churches supporting slavery at the time of the U.S. Civil War, Niebuhr concluded that the religious convictions of Abraham Lincoln, a man who never belonged to any church, “were superior in depth and purity to those, not only of the political leaders of his day, but of the religious leaders of the era.”

This lack of ethical “peripheral vision” among established religious leaders was also underscored by clergy in Memphis, Tenn., in the late 1960s. Having remained largely silent on the issue of racism, as manifest in the disgraceful treatment of Memphis’s black sanitation workers, these men of the cloth watched in horror as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who had come to Memphis in support of the sanitation worker’s strike, was gunned down April 4, 1968. Soon after, these once-silent clergy filled the mayor’s office, demanding justice for the workers and expressing shame that it took the death of Dr. King to prompt them to action.

These vignettes represent both a caution and a cattle prod. They remind religious communities that their ideological and personal biases may cloud their moral vision. But, ideally, they should serve to goad religious communities to try to shed their blinders and actively read and respond to “the signs of the times.”

While political pundits and certain faith leaders may dismiss or ignore figures such as Al Gore or Leonardo DiCaprio (who also has produced a compelling film on global warming, The 11th Hour), they do so at their own, and the planet’s, peril.

While neither Gore nor DiCaprio is a trained ethicist or ordained minister, they understand that global climate change constitutes one of the most important moral and spiritual challenges of our time. These men, one hailing from Washington, the other from Hollywood, echo the conclusion of 100 Nobel laureates, who, in December 2001, declared that global warming and social injustice, rather than terrorism, pose the planet’s greatest threat.

Out of the mouths of celebrities and Nobel laureates….The world prays that our religious leaders will have not only the ears to hear, but also the humility to listen to these unlikely heralds.

Source: thestar.com

IVCA Clarion Award Winners 2007

Supported by Jacaranda

The 11th Hour
Directed by: Leila Conners Petersen and Nadia Conners
Written by: Leila Conners Petersen, Nadia Conners and Leonardo DiCaprio
Produced by: Warner Bros

A pioneering film which explains how we impact on the world’s ecosystems and what we can do to change course in the short time left while change is still possible. Along with An Inconvenient Truth it is one of the most important statements on the threat faced by our planet and a clarion call for us all to work together for a better future.

Source: ivca.org