Pleased to Meet You, Sarah Withrow King – An Interview with the Author of Vegangelical
In today’s edition of Pleased to Meet You, we introduce Sarah Withrow King, author of our recent book Vegangelical. She is deputy director of the Sider Center of Eastern University, and codirector of CreatureKind, which helps engage churches in new ways of thinking about animals and Christian faith. She is also an associate fellow at the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics and a covenant member of Circle of Hope. She does like cats but is more of a dog person.
Recently, we spent some time to get to know Sarah.
Tell us about yourself. What’s your story?
I get paid by the number of letters in my title, so I’m the Interim Director of the Sider Center on Ministry and Public Policy at Eastern University, and the co-director of…
Is It a Sin to Eat Meat? – An Excerpt from Vegangelical
Earlier this week, our blog introduced the three-tiered theological framework author Sarah Withrow King lays out to emphasize our responsibility as Christians to care for animals. In today’s excerpt from Vegangelical: How Caring for Animals Can Shape Your Faith, we will explore some of the hard questions she wrestled with before embracing a vegan lifestyle that we need to wrestle with ourselves.
While the decision is ultimately between you and God, the changes I suggest Christians ought to make are significant. When we have grown up accepting the current state of human-animal relations without interrogating the narrative that tells us animals are ours, the first steps can seem daunting. My initial reaction was to grow defensive, to assume that my actions were justified. What follows are some of the questions I wrestled with when…
A Three-Point Framework for an Evangelical Theology of Animal Care
Recently, there has been a heightened sense of justice within the evangelical community for the welfare of various “others”. Yet one group within creation has often received little attention:
Animals.
Admittedly, though I adore my spunky Terrier-Boxer-Pug dog Zoe, I haven’t much considered how caring for animals connects to my faith. But Christian activist Sarah Withrow King has caused me to rethink how animals fit into God’s broader creation plan and re-creation initiative through Christ.
King’s new book is called Vegangelical “because caring for animals has helped me appreciate the Good News in deeper and wider ways, and though the work is often heartbreaking, I have hope in a resurrected Christ, who is calling his whole creation home.” (16)
She opens her book by carefully outlining an evangelical theology of animal care.…