In Conversation with Biblical Scholar, Activist Patricia Tull
Last Wednesday (May 31), Third Act Faith members were treated to a delightful — and inspiring — online conversation with Hebrew Bible scholar, author, climate activist and new member of our coordinating committee Patricia “Trisha” Tull. She was interviewed by TAF member Dan Terpstra during our General Meeting. The interview followed a conversational format first used at our January meeting when Pat Almonrode interviewed GreenFaith leader Fletcher Harper
As we did then, we transcribed the conversation, and Going Deep is pleased to share it with you. Their conversation not only explores how Trisha’s vocation and faith intersect with her climate activism personally and professionally, but it also shows how hope can arise and friendships be forged through our “common cause,” as Trisha puts it. A video recording of the General Meeting may be viewed here. The conversation between Trisha and Dan took place right after the opening reflection by Betsy Bennett, a TAF co-facilitator. The interview has been edited for clarity.
Dan: I’m following in the tradition of Pat Almonrode and Fletcher Harper from GreenFaith, who a couple of General Meetings ago had an interview with each other. Tonight I have the pleasure of interviewing Patricia Tull.
The Rev. Dr. Patricia K. Tull is A.B. Rhodes Professor Emerita of Hebrew Bible at Louisville Seminary in Kentucky. In that life, she specialized in the biblical prophet Isaiah. She has devoted her post-academic life to environmental theology and creation care. Trisha is a Climate Reality presenter, a GreenFaith fellow, a former program director for Hoosier Interfaith Power and Light, and a certified permaculture designer. She lectures, preaches and leads workshops helping congregations to seek effective ways to address climate change. She and her spouse, the Rev. Don Summerfield, live in a net-zero energy home in Henryville, Indiana, where they enjoy growing much of their own food and hosting the key people who inspire their actions and advocacy against climate change: six children, five “children-in-law,” seven grandkids, and several adopted offspring as well as friends and church members.
Dan: Trisha and I first crossed paths 10 years ago, when I was trying to get Presbyterian Church leaders involved in Fossil Free PCUSA, the divestment movement within the Presbyterian Church. She was getting ready to publish her book “Inhabiting Eden” and asked me to read it. It has been a delight of mine to be able over the years to intersect with her on numerous occasions and have an opportunity to call her a friend.
Trisha: Thank you, Dan.
Dan: How did you go from studying Isaiah to being concerned about creation care, climate and environmental justice issues? What caused that transition to occur?
Trisha: In 2006, the movie “An Inconvenient Truth” came out, and I went to see it in the theater. I don’t know what happened to everybody else who was in the theater, but it spoke to me with a great deal of urgency in a way that I had not heard before. My father was a scientist, so I was well grounded in respect for science, if not the understanding of it. I thought if the scientists are saying this, then we should all have our pants on fire and all be doing something about it! At that moment, it was an opportune time for me: I was already a full professor and my children had just finished college. It was kind of a break point anyway.
So the biggest problem at first was trying to figure out what dealing with climate and environmental problems had to do with anything that I was skilled at, anything I already knew. It took a little fumbling around. I had this sense that if this problem is as big as it is, then all are called [to work on it]. Who is going to hear the call? All of us have a lot to contribute if we are able to dig down and find it.
I think the thing that was particularly on my mind was thinking about what kind of role religious leaders might play. E.O. Wilson talked about that in his little book “The Creation.” He talked about how scientists can tell what’s going on in the world, but it’s people of faith and people of goodwill and conviction who can talk about what we should do with the information that scientists are giving us. So I saw the religious world in general as a source of possible inspiration, although at the time I didn’t know anybody else who was in the position I was in.
I started digging into what — as a scholar and a Presbyterian minister — I had to offer. And I began to make some discoveries about ancient scripture that I actually found helpful.
I had already been through the frustration of recognizing that on some matters scripture is not that helpful, that we are having to “talk back” to scripture in some ways. Ancient people, I found, did not share our assumptions about separation from nature. These people — not only those of the Old Testament and the heritage of Christianity and Judaism but also of religions around the world that came from ancient times — recognize that we are embedded in the world; we need creation, we’re dependent on it and we’re not separate from it. There is a great deal in ancient scriptures around the world that addresses that.
So I got to work on what kinds of things I could use as a scholar, as a teacher and as a pastor and preacher, and I very quickly got around to what to do in my local congregation, what to do in my home and with my family. That’s where it came from.
Dan: So in six years you went from discovering Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” to publishing a book called “Inhabiting Eden” that basically dealt with all of us and our role in creation. What have you done since then? Where has your scholarship taken you in the decade since the publication of “Inhabiting Eden”?
Trisha: I’ve written a lot of articles on various levels, for scholars and for church leaders. Currently, I am writing the “Horizons Bible Study” for 2024/2025 on environmental justice. I found that was a wonderful opportunity to get to know that particular, extremely important aspect of environmental issues. This will be coming out next year through Presbyterian Women PC(USA).
Dan: You’ve also been involved in a group I think is called Presbyterian Climate Advocates?
Trisha: Yeah. Those are friends of mine in churches in southern Indiana who are involved in Citizens’ Climate Lobby and wanted to offer classes that got Presbyterians more deeply involved in climate work in their homes, in their churches and in advocacy with their political leaders and their communities. We offered that class seven or eight times over the course of two years. It was a lot of fun getting to work with them. This was our pandemic activity.
Dan: One of the things that Bill McKibben often says — and I’ve heard it from a number of other climate advocates — is that when people ask, “What can I do? What can I do as an individual?” the response is to say, “Stop acting like an individual.” What was your climate journey, besides academics? What did you do personally to act out that response to climate change and your concern for your carbon footprint — both in your home in Jeffersonville in the early days and with your church? And where do you find yourself living these days?
Trisha: We started at home. We lived in a 100-year-old house in downtown Jeffersonville about a block away from the Ohio River. It was an old and leaky four-square colonial house.
So we got to work. We had an energy audit, and we did what I’m sure that everybody on this call has done (or at least thought to do): We started tightening up the house. We plugged up the leaks, and we got more insulation. We weren’t able to use solar panels because we had too much shade. (Not a terrible thing to have. It meant that we didn’t use air conditioning much at all.) We were able, over the course of five years, to reduce our use of both electricity and gas by about two-thirds. And, at that time (it was the Obama era), we were hearing about the need to reduce the emissions from our electric grid over the course of many more years than that. Looking at what we had done, I thought, well, why is that so hard? Why can’t we just do that?
At church, I was a minister’s wife — my husband Don was pastor — so I was trying to figure out how to tread lightly and at the same time do something effective. I was teaching a Sunday School class, and somebody asked what we were doing for Earth Day. So I asked Don, “What are you doing for Earth Day?” and he said, “Why don’t you preach?” So I preached a sermon for Earth Day that was so effective that nobody talked to me about it for a whole year! (laughs)
Then, a year later, somebody who knew that I was interested said, “You know we really ought to be recycling here.” So I kinda grabbed her arm and started a committee. We started recycling, and our work grew and grew until finally we were able to put two rounds of solar panels on the church building after some energy conservation improvements.
It was an interesting journey because it was a very purple, middle-of-the-road church that began to identify itself as “the green church,” and it actually became the first Presbyterian Earth Care Congregation in Indiana. So we had fun with that. We’re no longer there. My husband has taken a half-time call in a town called Scottsburg, about 30 miles up the road. It gave us the opportunity to move and build a house on some land that we had in Henryville, Indiana, and we decided that we would just take the plunge and build a house that was so energy efficient and equipped with solar panels that we would be able to experiment with what it would be like to have an all-electric net-zero emissions home. We moved into it four years ago.
Since then, we’ve been given the opportunity to have an actual model to show other people that this is what we’re aiming for when we talk about “electrifying everything.” To have an energy-efficient home doesn’t necessarily mean that it looks a lot different from other homes. It’s just that it functions differently from other houses. So that’s what we did. And we’ve developed a lot of other habits: We're growing a lot of our own food, and trying to eat as low on the food chain as we can. We try not to waste plastic, not waste food, and we built a wildlife habitat for all of our four-footed and other-footed neighbors... We have fun.
Dan: What kinds of roadblocks did you run into when you were trying to get a net-zero carbon footprint home in southern Indiana?
Trisha: Well, actually we were quite fortunate. We found a designer who lives out in Washington state and is actually a home builder himself. He has a website called Zero Energy Plans. So I worked with a designer to figure out the house, and in the meantime, we found a builder who was an award-winning builder here in Indiana in terms of energy efficiency. So we got on a number of Zoom calls between the two of them, working out how the house would work, with a compromise between the optimum ideas that the designer had and the realities of materials and workmanship that were available in southern Indiana. Our biggest issue was with the HVAC people. They were equipped to do geothermal and in-floor radiant heat, and to make it all energy efficient with heat pumps. But we had some differences on how exactly that would work. But we worked it out. And we’re pleased with the result.
Dan: So where do you go from here? You have the net-zero home, you’ve got the electric car, and you’re still thinking about climate change and the church and how those fit together. You're still writing curricula. What are you thinking about how the church needs to respond? How do we, Third Act Faith, as a faith community respond to climate change? What directions do we go in?
Trisha: Well, I think I would have to follow the example of Katharine Hayhoe in saying that the most important thing we can do is to talk about it. We can act. We can do all these things. We can show by example a lot of things. But we need to communicate our concerns to other people, people we run into, people we know who will then use us as resources because they know we are involved. But even more important, we need to communicate with people we don’t know, with our legislators, and in chance meetings on the street.
Those of us who have EV’s [electric vehicles] and travel with them may have had this experience: I can’t go on a trip without running into somebody in the Walmart parking lot at the Electrify America station who wants to talk about EVs and what it is like to have EVs. ... I have had a number of conversations like that. Finding ways to say “Yeah, it’s a cool car. I enjoy driving it. I like the slower pace that driving an EV necessitates. And I’m driving it because I’m concerned about climate change. That might not be your thing, but it is my thing.” And more often than not these days, I’m finding people saying, “Oh yes. Oh yes, I’ve heard about that” and “I care.” Maybe, even sometimes asking, maybe not outright asking “What can I do?” but beginning to reflect on what their contribution might be.
So you know I go back and forth — as probably many people do — between being really worried about what the future holds and being very excited about the future that may be unfolding before us for our children and grandchildren. Not only a world where we’ve actually grappled with something this large and have begun to pull ourselves back from the brink but also that we’ve begun to create a world in which we belong as plain members of creation, a world where we appreciate more thankfully what is all around us, the relationships that we have with the larger-than-human world.
I’m hoping that this is going to be a much more rejuvenating world that we are going to be living into. I wish that I were young enough to be able to experience it. But there we are as 60 and older people (she smiles). We're going to be handing this over to some people coming after us.
Dan: That sounds to me like an excellent point at which to wrap this up. I look forward to one day sitting around your kitchen table in Henryville and going deeper with this conversation over some homegrown veggies. At some point in the future, we’ll make this happen. ...
Trisha: I hope to see you on my doorstep. Dan, thank you so much for your good questions and your kindness and talking to me about this. You mentioned at the beginning that this interview was inspired by a conversation between Pat and Fletcher. But I want to also emphasize that they’re very big people and I’m like you, just an ordinary person. I’m hoping this conversation might be only the start of people among us in Third Act Faith getting to know one another and interviewing one another successively so that we will know who one another is, how we join forces, and how we make common cause with one another.
Dan: We have speculated at one point that it might be an interesting approach to allow the interviewee to pick the next interviewee, and do this as an ongoing series. So maybe we could explore that. We’ll see where that goes.
Going Deep will be taking a summer break until September. However, we will continue to keep you up to date on our latest “News & Views” this summer with the ongoing publication of our monthly newsletter, Third Acts of Faith. Look for the next issue to land in your inbox during the third week of June.