Not Satire: Students Are Confessing Climate “Sins” To Potted Plants At This Mainstream Seminary

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Sep 19, 2019

As much as I wish it were, what you are about to read is not from The Babylon Bee. I checked. Students are honestly, truly, seriously confessing their sins to a bunch of potted plants in chapel over at Union Theological Seminary, which lovingly tags itself as the place “where faith and scholarship meet to reimagine the work of justice.”

According to the Washington Examiner, Union became the nation’s first independent seminary back in 1893 when it left the Presbyterian Church after the denomination tried to oust one of its professors for denying that the Bible is inerrant and inspired by God, among other things.

It seems they’ve come a long way since 1893. Well, a long way down into the stinking pit of theological liberalism, that is.

Go ahead and pop a Tylenol or two now, folks. You’re gonna need it.

“Today in chapel, we confessed to plants,” UTS declared Tuesday on Twitter, fully expecting to be taken seriously. “Together, we held our grief, joy, regret, hope, guilt and sorrow in prayer; offering them to the beings who sustain us but whose gift we too often fail to honor. What do you confess to the plants in your life?”

Seriously. From the looks of it, these folks pulled every potted plant out of the lobby and brought it over to this pile of dirt (what is even the point of the pile of dirt, anyway?), and began “confessing” to the plant beings.

I stand here before you a shocked, broken writer, unable to give adequate comment on this unmitigated insanity. I have no words for this. Well, none that I can afford to pay the swear jar for.

Naturally, Union’s plant confessional, which is reportedly part of professor Claudio Carvalhaes’ class “Extractivism: A Ritual/Liturgical Response,” unleashed massive criticism and mockery, like this:

https://twitter.com/spiral_of/status/1174420344452472833?s=20

And, my personal favorite:

https://twitter.com/adamhunteratc/status/1174258456414568449?s=20

While I would love nothing more than to end the article right now, believe me, that’s not where this story ends. If you didn’t take that Tylenol when I told you to, now’s the time.

While Union received plenty of sound rebuke for their clear embrace of paganism, they, of course, doubled down on the plant confession exercise in a follow up thread on Wednesday:

I understand that not many readers will be familiar with traditions in witchcraft and Wicca, but the similarities in language here are too stunning to ignore. This is literally just Wicca that has been lightly Christianized.

Something tells me their doctrine of sin is just a mite bit different than oh, I dunno, what the Bible says about it. Just a guess.

I think it’s pretty obvious why the work seems weird.

Engage with plants. Seriously.

Honestly, y’all, that’s all I can bear to report. It only gets worse, and I’m already on the verge of apoplexy here.

So, climate hysteria has invaded supposedly Christian seminaries and caused them to tightly embrace and defend a weird, quasi-Shinto breed of paganism.

After their massive thread defending the practice, Union resorted to simply retweeting examples of confessions from other folks:

Oh my heck, y’all. That’s it, I’m out. Can’t take it. I’ll let the good Dietrich Bonhoeffer, courtesy of the Washington Examiner once more, take it from here:

German pastor and anti-Nazi dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer was among the school’s more famous alumni, who left after escaping the Third Reich to teach there briefly in 1939. Appalled by the liberalism of its students, Bonhoeffer wrote they “are completely clueless with respect to what dogmatics is really about. They are not familiar with even the most basic questions. They become intoxicated with liberal and humanistic phrases, are amused at the fundamentalists, and yet basically are not even up to their level.”

Bonhoeffer remembered that students “openly [laughed]” at a lecture on sin and forgiveness, and accused the seminary of having “forgotten what Christian theology in its very essence stands for.”