Friday Care Package
Week 1: Unlearning the Empire; Day 2: Jesus’ Power to Heal, Not Dominate
Dear Substack Community: I’m combining the Friday Care Package with the Lenten meditation on power. Enjoy! Today is a longer piece of writing that I want each of you to consider. Can we step into the tangle of entanglements?
Each Friday, I write on care. I have decided to put care into everything I do, including my writing. Care is not a monolith; it does not look the same. I am a Transmasc Latino, so care looks like me cooking for my community and feeding people. It also looks like me not remaining silent about the harm that continues to be perpetuated against the underside of history. I sit down with my cup of mate and write. Today, I invite you back into the framework that I started several weeks ago and explore the ethics of care and the need to speak the painful truth. So, as we normally do, I invite you to breathe, and then consider what I have written.
Paz, —RCE+
Day 2: Jesus’ Power to Heal, Not Dominate
Jesus moved through the world healing, not ruling. He never sought to crush his enemies but to restore those who were broken. If we are to follow him, we must ask: Where is our power bringing healing, and where is it doing harm?
Tending the Wild, Tending Each Other: A Queer Ethics of Care Beyond the Human
Introduction
Care is often framed as an interpersonal, human-to-human ethic, shaped by proximity, empathy, and duty. But what happens when care extends beyond the human, when it becomes a multispecies entanglement of vulnerability, reciprocity, and co-flourishing? Drawing from queer ecologies and the ethics of care, this reflection explores how care is an act of kinship, not limited by species but woven through the very fabric of creation. What does it mean to queer the ethics of care? How does the concept of stewardship shift when reframed through multispecies interdependence rather than dominion? In engaging these questions, I turn to María Puig de la Bellacasa’s *Matters of Care*, Donna Haraway’s *Staying with the Trouble*, and theological insights that reimagine care as a radical act of shared becoming.
A Queer Ethics of Care: Kinship and Entanglement
Queer ecologies challenge the rigid binaries that separate human from nonhuman, subject from object, culture from nature. Instead of seeing care as a top-down duty from a dominant caretaker to a passive recipient, queer ecological ethics recognize care as a reciprocal, tangled practice. The fungal networks beneath our feet, the mycelial threads connecting trees, the air we exhale and share—these are sites of care that do not privilege human agency but instead insist on shared vulnerability.
María Puig de la Bellacasa frames care as an act of maintenance, repair, and response. But care is never neutral; it is always political. Who is cared for? Who is left outside the structures of care? Queer ethics remind us that care resists the logic of exclusion, instead flourishing in the messy, interconnected realities of interdependence. The queer, non-reproductive kinship models that many LGBTQ+ communities embrace mirror the adaptive, non-hierarchical relationships found in ecological networks. These models challenge us to think beyond the human family as the primary site of care and toward a broader, more expansive vision.
Theological Reimaginings: From Stewardship to Shared Becoming
Christian theology has long emphasized human dominion over the earth, even as some traditions have sought to reclaim stewardship as a more ethical, caretaking approach. But stewardship, too, can imply control, management, and hierarchy. What if, instead of stewardship, we spoke of mutual becoming?
Jesus’ metaphors—of vines and branches, of seeds and soil, of water and wilderness—invite us into a relational understanding of creation. In John 15:5, Jesus says, "I am the vine; you are the branches." This is not a hierarchy but an invitation into entanglement, a vision of life sustained through relationality rather than separation. The lilies of the field, which "neither toil nor spin," are not passive recipients of divine care but part of an ecosystem of flourishing where care is diffuse, decentralized, and ongoing.
When we embrace this vision, care becomes an act of mutual tending. We are not caretakers *over* creation but co-creators *within* it. The baptismal waters that mark Christian identity are not just human waters; they are the same waters that nourish the land, cycle through the air, and sustain the lives of creatures unseen. To participate in the sacred act of care is to recognize this shared dependence, to undo the colonial logics that separate human from nonhuman, sacred from profane.
Poetic Meditation: Tending the Wild, Tending Each Other
The roots below speak in pulses, in quiet exchanges of phosphorus and kin.
Not giving, not taking, but sharing what is needed.
We call it the underworld, but they call it home.
The river carves a path, not by force but by persistent return.
We step into its currents, naming them baptismal,
forgetting that the water has been here longer than us,
and will be here long after.
The wind carries pollen and prayers alike,
swirling in a chorus of what has been and what will be.
The trees do not ask which breath is ours and which belongs to the deer.
They simply take in what is offered.
Let us be like the roots, like the river, like the trees.
Tending the wild, tending each other.
A care that does not control, but trusts the entanglement of life.
Conclusion: Living Into the Tangle
To embrace a queer ethics of care is to embrace the tangle—to recognize that care is not a one-way street, nor is it an act of dominance. It is a shared vulnerability, a sacred mutuality. In a world increasingly marked by climate crisis and ecological devastation, a queer care ethic refuses to see nonhuman life as mere resource. Instead, it asks: How do we learn to care from the nonhuman world? How do we make kin, not as an act of power but as an act of solidarity?
As we move forward in our practices of faith, activism, and community, may we tend not just to human needs but to the needs of the entangled, pulsing, breathing world around us. Let us queer our notions of care, widening our circle of kinship until it holds the soil, the fungi, the river, the breath. And in doing so, may we find ourselves cared for in return.