Cultivating a Common Sacred Flourishing: A Green Orthodox Christian Perspective

During his address to the World Council of Religions for Peace in the summer of 2025; Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople; the leading voice for ecological awareness in the Eastern Orthodox Church; issued a profound call for people of faith to unite together in common cause to develop a ‘new natural philosophy’ that unites the scientific and the spiritual and which can serve as a framework for what he called a “common sacred flourishing.” This essay seeks to contribute to this task in two ways. First; by proposing a science-engaged theological framework for the Orthodox Christian tradition; I will argue that Orthodox theology is compatible with the emerging scientific fields of biosemiotics and biomimicry; which I will suggest may serve as the basis for the new natural philosophy the Patriarch describes. Secondly; I will propose that we adopt the term euzoia to refer to this common sacred flourishing as a new ecologically synergistic state of thriving and will argue that we can work toward achieving it by following the “canon of nature’s laws” described by the biomimetic thinker Janine Benyus. In doing so; I will conclude with a discussion of how each of these “natural laws” may be applied to the organization of our social and moral lives as we all collectively pursue our common sacred flourishing.