Pope Francis!  If you've read any of the Pope's recent encyclical on the environment and you have any inclination, any inclination at all to support human attempts to reduce environmental degradation, you likely cheered (I did).  In particular, I cheered that Francis made clear that one's religion should affect everything we do.  It does not do, he argued, to let our religious belief into only certain areas of our life, or to pursue our religious beliefs for our good and no one else's.  We do not do them justice (nor, I might add, do we do justice to the God who inspired them).  The metaphysical encompasses everything.
     Speaking to a crowd of people a couple of days before Francis released his encyclical, U.S. presidential candidate Jeb Bush remarked that, "I hope I'm not going to get castigated for saying this by my priest back home, but I don't get economic policy from my bishops or my cardinals or my pope."  "Religion," he added, "ought to be about making us better as people, less about things that end up getting into the political realm."
     We need to wonder, really, what Bush thinks religion is.  We can't turn the metaphysical on and off.  It's either everywhere or nowhere.  Besides, do not "better" people make for a "better" political realm?
     Thanks, Pope Francis, for demonstrating that our religion should shape everything we think, say, and do, including how we treat our earth.
     As the opening lines of Psalm 24 say, "The earth is the Lord's, and all that is therein."