The Green the Church movement seeks “to expand the role of churches as centres for environmental resilience”. Its charismatic leader, Dr Ambrose Carroll, argues that communion with the natural world is fundamental to the past and future of his congregation: “We’re ex-slaves,” he says, “migrant farmers, people who spent eons with our hands in the ground. Even though we don’t speak the language of environmentalism, it’s very close to who we are.”
Carroll’s ministry is one focus of photographer Lucas Foglia’s project about prayer in nature. Foglia’s own mission is clear, he says: “In a divided time in the United States, I want to point to a common ground. The people I photographed from every major religion share the belief that wild places are both a refuge and our responsibility.” This picture of a child, Omari, being lifted into magnolia blossom, on show later this month at a photography fair in New York, was taken at the annual open-water baptism ceremony that takes place in Atlanta, Georgia, each year.
The prayer project is an evolution of Foglia’s continuing quest for contemporary Edens. He grew up on a family farm on Long Island. His parents were part of the back-to-the-land movement where food was grown for barter. Since 2006, he has travelled the country, often photographing off-grid communities, hippies and hunter-gatherers and religious sects, as well as the toxic effects of our industrialised exploitation of the natural world. This latest series is an attempt to locate some fundamental and shared sense of wonder in engagement with the environment. An advocate of wild spaces within cities, Foglia suggests that some of the urban places that still have the least plant life are urban school playgrounds. “It does always feel important to have [children] touch nature,” he says, “because it is through direct contact that we create empathy.”
