Gary Kowalski - Minister and Animal Rights Activist

Gary A. Kowalski is a minister and an American author noted for his books on eco-spirituality, science, history, and animals. He is the author of eight books including:

The Souls of Animals, Science and the Search for God

Goodbye Friend: Healing Wisdom For Anyone Who Has Ever Lost A Pet

Blessings of the Animals: Celebrating Our Kinship With All Creation

The Bible According To Noah: Theology As If Animals Mattered, Earth Day

Green Mountain Spring and Other Leaps of Faith

Revolutionary Spirits: The Enlightened Faith of America's Founding Fathers

A graduate of Harvard College and the Harvard Divinity School, Kowalski was the senior minister of Burlington's First Unitarian Universalist Society for over 20 years. While there, he performed about 25 marriage ceremonies each year, including same-sex marriages because Kowalski said that the church should support all long-term, mutually committed relationships. He also served on the Vermont State Advisory Panel to the United States Commission on Civil Rights.

In the summer of 2010, Kowalski left Burlington and moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, to begin a 12-month interim ministry for the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Santa Fe. In the following year, he became interim minister at the First Parish Unitarian Universalist, of Sudbury, Massachusetts.

The Bible According to Noah: Theology As If Animals Mattered

 

 

The Bible According to Noah explores the ancient stories of the Creation, Noah's Ark, Abraham's near sacrifice of Isaac, the torment of Job, and Jonah and the whale to explore their relevance today—especially in regard to how we view and treat other animals. Kowalski draws together the findings of animal science to create an ecologically inspired rendition of the scriptures that honors the sanctity and kinship of all living beings. He uncovers the psychological and spiritual connections we have with other animals and those, such as children, who are left in our care. Kowalski calls for a different reading of the ancient wisdom of the Bible—one that advocates nonviolence, tolerates difference, and demands justice.

 



The book takes this topic to new depths of intellectual inquiry, examining the role of animals in biblical texts and, by extension, contemporary culture. Arguing that a new appreciation of animals is desperately needed to rescue Western society from its own anti-environmentalism, Gary Kowalski offers new renditions of familiar biblical stories: God tells humans to love the earth and preserve it instead of dominate it.

Goodbye, Friend

 

In the book, Goodbye, Friend, author Gary Kowalski takes you on a journey of healing, offering warmth and sound advice on how to cope with the death of your companion animal. Filled with heartwarming stories and practical guidance on such matters as taking care of yourself while mourning, creating rituals to honor your companion's memory, talking to children about death, and considering death and the continuum of life, Goodbye, Friend is a beautiful and comforting book for anyone grieving the loss of a beloved animal and is a much-needed resource for any grieving companion parent.

 



The author shows the need for the Church to recognize bereavement for companion animals in the same way it recognizes bereavement over human loss and the need to stop denying the fact that animals have souls and spirits, just as we do.

Through a series of short chapters, the author walks us through the mourning process of various individuals through whom we can relate our own losses and look forward with hope to seeing our lost companions again in heaven. Our feelings of loss are not unique, but universal among all people of compassion.

He concludes his book with ideas for creating a memorial service and inspirational readings from many faiths, past and present.

Blessings of the Animals: Celebrating Our Kinship with All Creation

 

This is a brand new book that came out yesterday! Included in Blessings of the Animals:

 

Find out how "swarm intelligence" is creating smarter phone systems inspired by the creativity and collective wisdom of the common ant.

Discover what happens when a visionary artist travels to Africa to bury the portraits of 23 primates who died in a Philadelphia zoo.

Ponder how cultures as diverse as the Cherokee, Chinese, Egyptians, and ancient Hindus identified the night's brightest star with a canine spirit guide.

Explore how meditation practice helps a Buddhist beekeeper fend off a disease that threatens most of the world's honeybees.

 

 

The Souls of Animals

 

In this revised edition of his celebrated book, The Souls of Animals, Unitarian Universalist minister Reverend Gary Kowalski discusses the big spiritual questions around our relationship with animals--whether they have souls, self-consciousness, awareness of death, and a capacity for recognizing beauty. Rev. Kowalski combines heartwarming stories with solid science to show that other creatures are not insensitive objects devoid of feeling and intellect but thinking, sentient beings with an inward, spiritual life.

 

 

The Souls of Animals presents insights into the emotional lives of animals, their creative abilities, their sense of play, their experience of love, and their awareness of death. As John Robbins states in the preface: this book is a resource that is about "learning to take our place with reverence and respect in the council of all beings."