A Brother Among Brothers
Francis of Assisi did not write theology in the academic sense. He sang it. In the Canticle of the Creatures, composed near the end of his life while he was seriously ill and nearly blind, he calls the sun “brother”, the moon and stars “sister”, and even death a sibling. The poem is not decorative piety. It is a claim about the structure of reality. If God is Creator and Father, then the world is not a warehouse of objects arranged for human use. Every creature that shares existence with us belongs to a wider community of life.
Francis did not stand outside creation as its manager. He lived inside it as a relative.
That movement—from ownership to kinship—is what makes Franciscan spirituality feel startlingly current eight centuries later. We have inherited a language about nature that treats it mostly as inventory: resources to extract, land to develop, animals to process, and a landscape to place behind quarterly growth. Francis offers another vocabulary, built on relationship rather than utility. In an age of climate anxiety and an economy that turns living things into disposable products, that vocabulary is not sentimental. It is theological resistance.
From Dominion to Extraction
Christian teaching has spent decades correcting the idea that “dominion” in Genesis means permission to dominate. In Laudato Si’, Pope Francis draws on the spirituality of his namesake to argue that ecological destruction and human suffering are inseparable. The encyclical calls for an “integral ecology” that respects both environmental and human dimensions, because the ecological crisis is also a social crisis.
The pattern is visible in the technologies and consumer habits often presented as progress. Lithium mining for phones, batteries, and electric vehicles can place environmental and social burdens on Indigenous and poor communities that receive little of the profit. Fast fashion produces waste on a staggering scale: the equivalent of one garbage truck of clothing is reportedly landfilled or incinerated every second. Factory farming, meanwhile, reduces billions of living creatures to units of production, confinement, and yield.
None of this is dominion in the biblical sense. It is extraction wearing dominion’s name as a disguise.
Kinship cuts through that disguise. It changes what we are willing to do to a relative. We do not poison a sister’s water to shave a percentage from a supply chain. We do not treat a brother’s habitat as an acceptable line-item loss. We do not call the destruction of a community an externality simply because it appears far away on a balance sheet.
That is why kinship is more demanding than stewardship can sometimes be. Stewardship may still leave us imagining ourselves as managers of the world. Kinship reminds us that we are participants in a community we did not create and cannot replace.
The Discomfort of Kinship
Here is where honest commentary has to push back a little—even on Francis. Kinship theology can drift into an Instagram-ready spirituality if we allow it: nature as a gentle companion, all sunsets and birdsong, with no hunger, danger, conflict, or cost. Francis’s world was not romantic. Wolves killed livestock. Winters killed people. Poverty was not a lifestyle accessory. His famous encounter with the wolf of Gubbio ends not with the wolf becoming harmless but with a covenant: food in exchange for peace.
The story comes to us through a later Franciscan tradition rather than a document written during Francis’s lifetime, but its moral imagination is revealing. Francis addresses the wolf as “Brother Wolf”, acknowledges the harm it has caused, and still recognises hunger as part of the story. The solution is neither sentimental approval nor extermination. It is a difficult arrangement in which both the community and the animal are drawn into obligations.
Kinship, then, does not mean pretending that all creatures are safe, identical, or equally capable of moral responsibility. It means refusing to treat difference as permission for indifference. It asks us to negotiate with reality rather than escape into images of purity.
That matters for a culture that outsources guilt to hashtags. A spirituality of creation that produces only admiration will not survive a crisis demanding economic disruption, political conflict, and personal sacrifice. Carbon pricing may threaten some livelihoods before new protections are in place. Rewilding may require limits on land use. A transition away from exploitative industries may impose real costs on workers and communities unless it is deliberately made just.
The Franciscan vision works only if it holds wonder and cost together. Otherwise, it becomes one more aesthetic we consume—filed beside the plant-based milk and the reusable straw—while the underlying structures remain untouched.
Personal, but Not Merely Personal
It is tempting to file all this under “environmentalism” and hand it off to policymakers, corporations, and experts far from daily life. Francis would have resisted that handoff. His spirituality of creation was intensely personal: poverty, simplicity, gratitude, attention, and solidarity were the practices that made kinship possible.
But the personal cannot be used as a substitute for the political. Individual choices matter, yet individuals do not design global supply chains, determine energy policy, set wages, or regulate mining. Franciscan ecology begins with conversion of the heart, but it must eventually confront the institutions that organise desire and distribute harm.
The question, therefore, is not merely, “What can I recycle?” It is more searching:
-Do I need this?
-Who or what must be diminished for me to have it?
-Which costs have been hidden so that my life can appear convenient?
Francis’s poverty was not deprivation for its own sake. It was space cleared in a crowded life so that he could actually notice his siblings—human and otherwise—instead of consuming them invisibly. To live simply is not to romanticise hardship or place the burden of reform on the poor. It is to challenge an economic order that teaches the affluent to experience endless acquisition as freedom.
The application is personal, but it cannot remain merely personal. It begins with appetite and ends by asking who profits from manufacturing that appetite.
A Family We Did Not Choose
Families are not chosen, and they are not always comfortable. You do not get to select only the siblings who are attractive, useful, or agreeable. That is the most honest thing about Franciscan ecology. We do not get to decide which parts of creation deserve care: the charismatic species and the ugly ones, the scenic coastline and the toxic industrial site nobody photographs, the neighbour who recycles and the corporation that does not.
Kinship is not selective affection. It is a discipline of responsibility.
Francis’s genius was refusing to let that truth remain abstract. He turned it into greeting, song, poverty, and daily attention. He did not merely say that creation was valuable. He behaved as though the world were populated by relatives whose existence placed claims upon him.
Eight hundred years later, that refusal is not mediaeval eccentricity. It is a challenge to the legal and economic fiction that the world is primarily property. The question before us is not whether creation belongs to us. It is whether we are willing to belong to creation—and to accept the obligations that belonging entails.
Francis’s warning is therefore also an invitation: to consume less, notice more, protect what cannot defend itself, and build economies in which no community is treated as expendable. The world is not our inventory. It is our common home, and its creatures are not objects beside us but relations among whom we must learn, again, how to live.