Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast. I'm Emanuel Vaughn Lee, executive editor of Emergence

Magazine. In each issue, we feature in-depth interviews, narrated essays, and stories, exploring

the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

Paul Ellie is a writer and a senior fellow with the Berkeley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs. His books include Reinventing Bach and the life you save may be your own,

both finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

He has a frequent contributor to the New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker.

In this essay, Paul revisits Pope Francis' environmental encyclical, Laudato C., and is

struck by the thought that the Catholic Church and the natural world have traded places.

We got to the campground after dark and chose a sight by the light of a full moon,

which lit up the outline of our black minivan.

Colorado, mountains, starlit skies, stadium-sized gas stations, and now Mesa Verde National Park,

a gatehouse and 10 miles of two-lane road, tracing a line of switchbacks 4,500 feet up a mountain.

After the Badlands, the Black Hills, Wind Cave, Yellowstone, Grand Teton, Grand Canyon, Monument Valley,

astonishing each and all.

This would be our last national park.

A last stop in the west before the long lateral

slog to Washington, D.C., and a last encounter with the wilderness. I pitched the tent by moonlight

with the boys as drowsy, bulky assistants. They piled in and zipped the door. Lenora sat at a picnic

table eyeing the night sky.

I crunched down the road toward the latrines.

The other tents were dark and silent, cars battened down as if for the judgment.

A few minutes earlier I had accidentally backed the van into a concrete bulwark, mistaking a dumpster

...