motion-a theology that has been honed over the centuries through the Church's repeated engagement with its central questions. Whether in its encounter with the Manichaeism of the fourth century, the Albigensians of the thirteenth, or the reductive materialists of the twenty-first, the Church's consistent witness has been on behalf of the order, beauty, and goodness of creation.5 Francis's encyclopedic appeal to witnesses from the ancient tradition (as well as more recent bishops' statements from around the globe) demonstrates that Laudato Si' is the magisterial expression of that core conviction in the twenty-first century. Its central significance lies in the clear affirmation that the native habitat of the human person as a spiritual creature is precisely this material cosmos of organic beings. The human person, whose dignity lies within a spiritual destiny, is nevertheless a creature of this ordered earth-a living, organic being among other organic beings whose immortal soul by nature transcends the cosmos and yet, by grace, permeates it with eternal significance.

Laudato Si' poses a fundamental question to every citizen of the globe: how do you and I, as human beings, as sons and daughters of the Father, flourish within this divinely ordered cosmos? As such, one can read the document as an extended meditation upon and application of the natural law, for natural law is nothing other than those principles of moral discernment that emerge from the affirmation that we are embodied rational creatures participating in a divinely ordered reality, otherwise known as the "eternal law."6 Francis's overall aim is to make relevant to twenty-first century audiences the moral imperatives that follow upon the natural inclinations that all of us pursue as embodied creatures drawn to flourishing by the call of a loving Father.

That the phrase "natural law" itself is absent from the document is not determinative, for the nomenclature surrounding natural law ethics in the modern academy has increasingly been cast as an ethic set within a cosmos devoid of a natural teleology. Francis himself alludes to the shifting valuation of "nature" in contemporary culture (§86). In academic circles specifically, the characterization of our participation in the ordered cosmos has been critiqued as: concep-

5 For a survey of Western theological engagement with such related issues, see Clarence Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Time to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967).6 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae (hereafter, ST) I-II, q. 91, a. 2.

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Laudato Si’ and the Rise of Green Thomism

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