Keith Douglass Warner OFM's
Research and Education Website

I am a Franciscan Friar actively retrieving the Franciscan intellectual tradition, with a special focus on environmental ethics and philosophy of science. I am a member of the St. Barbara Province of Franciscan Friars and a Regent at the Franciscan School of Theology in Berkeley. My presentation for the Franciscan Vision series at FST on November 17, 2011 is titled Spirituality + Science = Care for Creation: Retrieving a Franciscan Cosmology for Climate Conservation. In the summer of 2012, I will be co-teaching a special two week short course with Bill Short OFM and Mary Beth Ingham: Creation, Humanity and Science  in the Franciscan Intellectual Tradition   July 30 – August 10, 2012 Old Mission Santa Barbara

The retrieval of the Franciscan intellectual tradition opens up new horizons for re-imagining the human relationship to nature. St. Francis is the premier example of Christian love for creation, but the Franciscan tradition has many more robust resources for helping us care for creation today.

Bill Short OFM, Mary Beth Ingham CSJ, and I will present exciting new perspectives emerging from the retrieval of the Franciscan intellectual tradition. They will presents the Franciscan traditions of philosophy, theology, love of natural beauty and moral vision to help us address a most pressing problem facing humanity: our relationship to the natural world. Read a complete description of the program! This residential summer course makes our internationally-recognized faculty available to those who cannot attend during the school year at our Berkeley campus. Beautiful, historic Old Mission Santa Barbara hosts this two week course.

Here is a keynote I gave to the Association of Franciscan Colleges and Universities biennial symposium, June 2010 at University of St. Francis (Ft. Wayne) The Incarnation Matters: Franciscan Education for Ecological Conversion (you can view this free of charge through ITunesU) This was published a version of this keynote in their AFCU journal. Recently I have started researching and writing about a Franciscan philosophy of science, with Fray Bernardino de Sahagun as an example of this tradition. I wrote articles for wikipedia on Bernardino and the Florentine Codex he co-created with his Aztec students --check out the digital images from the codex! I wrote about Bernardino and the global reach of the Franciscan intellectual tradition for The Cord.

My best known work is Care for Creation: A Franciscan Spirituality of the Earth, which I coauthored with Ilia Delio OSF and Pam Wood. It has a beautiful cover, which you can see on this nifty flyer for publicity! You can order it from the (2008) publisher, St. Anthony Messenger Press, or Amazon. The following article is an excerpt from the book, Species Preservation Matters! which appeared in St. Anthony Messenger (magazine), October 2007, pp 22-26 (with pictures!). The book won two awards in 2009 from the Catholic Press Association: First place for "Social Concerns" and second place for "Spirituality." I first met Ilia when I presented at the WTU Franciscan Symposium in May 2003: “Taking Nature Seriously: Nature Mysticism, Franciscan Spirituality, and Environmental Advocacy.” It was published in Ilia Delio OSF, ed., Franciscans and Creation: What is Our Responsibility? St. Bonaventure, NY: The Franciscan Institute (2004). Care for Creation refers to the song "Sacred Creation" by Rufino Zaragoza OFM, which you can access through Oregon Catholic Press; some of the words are here and here.Here's an audio file of a talk that I gave at the Franciscan School of Theology on Franciscan Environmental Ethics on February 21, 2008.

Two of my recent publications in this field are Franciscan Environmental Ethics: Imagining Creation as a Community of Care in Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics (Summer 2011); Living the Gospel on a Climate Disrupted Planet, webpublished by Franciscan Sisters of the Poor in 2011.

I contributed Retrieving Saint Francis: Tradition and Innovation for Our Ecological Vocation to Green Discipleship: Catholic Theological Ethics and the Environment, edited by Tobias L. Winright (Anselm Academic, 2011).

Here's an article from the Journal of Religion and American Culture titled The Greening of American Catholicism: Identity, Conversion and Continuity .

On November 10, 2010 I participated in a Markkula Center for Applied Ethics presntation "The Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and the Precautionary Principle" and you can watch a recording of that here. I gave a presentation at the University of St. Thomas (Moore, not of Aquinas) Law School Symposium on Catholic Social Teaching in September 2007 titled The Moral Significance of Creation in the Franciscan Theological Tradition: Implications for Contemporary Catholics and Public Policy.

I have also developed the Franciscan philosophy studium, a program for friars to learn about our Franciscan tradition while completing pre-theology requirements, with continuing education units through the University of San Diego.Here is a write up of the program. This picture gives you a sense of what it looks like

“Get Him Out of the Birdbath!” In Franciscan Theology of the Environment: An Introductory Reader, edited by Dawn M. Nothwehr OSF. Quincy Il: Franciscan Press, 2003. Republished from “Out of the Birdbath: Following the Patron Saint of Ecology” The Cord. 48:2 March 1998: 74-85.

Poverty & Environmental Justice in Franciscan Perspective with Luke Clause and Stephen Maurano. Published in 2007 in World Poverty: Franciscan Reflections, by Franciscans Intenational, an NGO with observer status at the United Nations.

"Was St. Francis a Deep Ecologist?" In Albert LaChance and John E. Carroll, eds. Embracing Earth: Catholic Approaches to Ecology. Maryknoll NY: Orbis Press, 1994, 225-240.

Here are some pictures of me with Franciscans I met in South Africa.

For information regarding this website please contact Keith Douglass Warner OFM
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