Josh, a proud graduate of Wheaton College, wrote yesterday of the growing number and quality of environmental studies programs at the member schools in the Consortium of Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU). It's a significant trend and part of the larger ferment represented by increasingly outspoken positions on global warming taken by such evangelical Christian leaders as Richard Cizik of the National Association of Evangelicals.

Josh is our go-to guy for all things evangelical Christian (as I am for all things Unitarian-Universalist-and-recovering-Christian-Scientist), but he encouraged me to add a little historical perspective on this phenomenon on CCCU campuses. From 1993 to 1996, when I was helping the Pew Charitable Trusts distribute part of the fortune accumulated by the founder of the Sun Oil Company, I had the pleasure of working with the small handful of CCCU members then developing their environmental studies programs. They were few, and they were cautious -- for good reason: biology teachers from several schools told me that roughly 75 percent of their incoming first-year students believed in the literal truth of the Biblical creation story. That made it a little tougher to teach, say, why human-generated climate change could outpace evolutionary processes of adaptation. Some of these pioneering professors also had a problem getting their administrations, colleagues and students to say the words "environmental" and "environmentalist." They prayed over it. (I didn't.)

When those early leaders began speaking of their environmental concerns as "creation care," I know they were expressing their deep religious convictions; but it was also a truly inspired (Inspired?) bit of reframing. Check out Creation Care magazine, the journal of the Evangelical Environmental Network, right here.