A HALF CENTURY AGO, William F. Buckley, Jr., created quite a stir when he published God and Man At Yale, bemoaning the junior status accorded the Almighty within its ivied walls. Today a new phenomenon is sweeping the Yale campus, especially at Yale Divinity School, where in the mid-1940s I studied theology and social ethics.

Yale has not escaped the many moods and causes dredged up by the countercultural zeitgeist. None has been more colorful, flamboyant, or intense than the current green revolution. This is dramatically manifest in the current issue of Reflections, the official quarterly of the Divinity School. It's theme and title is "God's Green Earth: Creation, Faith, Crisis." The cover carries Giovanni di Paolo's the Expulsion from Paradise (1445), a bright painting depicting a nude angel expelling an equally nude Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden.

Thumbing through the 76 pages of 10.5 by 7.5 inch glossy paper, I was struck by the dramatic, indeed apocalyptic, tone of virtually all of its twenty articles. Among the titles:

"Daring to Dream: Religion and the Future of the Earth"
"The Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship: Religion and Environmentalism"
"Earthkeeping and the Bible"
"Avoiding the Great Collision: 'We Can Save What is Left'"
"Environmental Justice and a New American Dream"
"Everything that Breathes Praises God"
"Eco-ethics and Global Citizenship: A View from Central America"
"Green Discipleship"

One article calls for a "new species identity." Another warns that "If Christians inadequately understand the ecology of God's desire for humanity, then they stutter before the fullness of their gospel." And an author wonders whether the "world economy can be tamed" to restore "the natural world." Then there were the misty poems:

Owl in the black morning, mockingbird in the burning
Slants of the sunny afternoon declare so simply. . . .
Of the mockingbird and the owl, the waves, and the wind
And then, like peace after perfect speech, such stillness.

I could go on and on, but this may be sufficient to suggest that Yale Divinity School is promoting a new Pantheism, the belief that "nature is God," a worldview popular in the eighteenth century and long held by many tribal peoples who are persuaded their god speaks to them through volcanoes, earthquakes, and lightening.

Reading this version of Yale's new green creed, including it's veneration of all living things large and small, recalls a limerick I wrote two years ago:

I love all trees and buzzing bees
And great things like the Seven Seas.
Everything global
Makes me feel noble
But I still have a problem with fleas.