Sun Day is Coming!

The Cottage August Bookapalooza: "Here Comes the Sun" by Bill McKibben

Aug 26, 2025

Bill McKibben needs no introduction to most Cottage readers. As a writer, environmentalist, organizer, and activist, he is one of those rare human beings whose work moves from the printed page to college classrooms to the wilderness to the streets and to offices of politicians and philanthropists around the world. The breadth of his influence is enormous — and inspiring.

I first read his work in the early 1990s. At the time, I was working as a college professor and wrote a column on faith and politics that was distributed by the New York Times syndicate. My job entailed paying attention to the great issues of our times — and to learn from the work of other writers and thinkers. Someone — I can’t remember who — directed me to Bill’s book, The End of Nature.

The End of Nature is widely considered to be the first book on climate change written for a popular audience. Its arguments on the subject made me change my mind. Really. Until I read Bill’s work, I was skeptical that climate scientists were little more than chicken-little control-freaks. My own conversion of Earth-care came from Bill’s mentorship through books and articles.

Not only did I read to learn, but I read his work for the sheer beauty of his prose. Bill writes about hard and beautiful things with obvious craft and lyricism. I’ve often referred to him as a “writer’s writer,” the kind of person other writers read to inspire our own work.

Okay, I guess I’ve made myself clear: I’m a fan.

As my own publishing career grew, a surprise came via my email: Bill reached out to me with one of the kindest, most complimentary notes I’ve ever received from another writer. We started an occasional correspondence based on a common love for creation, Christ, and the craft of writing.

His current project is sharing the Good News of Solar. Despite the endless tirade of bad news, we are at the edge of the climate revolution we’ve been waiting and working for: cheap, clean energy to power the entire globe (read about the strides of solar in the United States HERE).

Bill’s brand new book, Here Comes the Sun, takes us on a tour of transformation and hope. Changing everything is possible — but not easy. As he says in the book’s introduction, “In true Hollywood fashion, our liberation and our destruction are arriving at precisely the same time, offering us a remarkable choice. Everything is going wrong, except this one big thing. Our species, at what feels like a very dark moment, can take a giant leap into the light. Of the sun.”

In the excerpt below, he reminds us of the spiritual dimensions of the sun — and the centrality of the sun to images and understandings of salvation, especially to Christians.

And, of course, he’s doing more than putting words on a page for us to read. He’s also involved in organizing Sun Day, a global day of solar activism on September 21, 2025. Go to the Sun Day website and find an event to attend or sign up to help.

Follow Bill’s example: words and actions are of a piece. Knowing Bill, I’m pretty sure he got that idea from James: “What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you?… faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.”

Go to THIS LINK for more information and buying options.

This is a history, a handbook, a hopeful look at the energy revolution that’s already well underway.

Here Comes the Sun takes us into a new era beyond fossil fuels and all the literal and political poison they bring ― and shows us what the obstacles are in getting there. Written with Bill McKibben’s inimitable clarity, it is also a gripping read about science, history, culture, and possibility that equips us all to be climate champions.

― Rebecca Solnit

An Excerpt from Here Comes the Sun by Bill McKibben

The central role of the sun in the religious life of humans has faded in most places over the millennia. Look to the Middle East, for example, the place we sometimes think of as the cradle of civilization. The sun was pre-eminent for the Sumerian civilization; Utu, the sun god, and his Akkadian successor Shamash could see, as they traversed the sky, all that happened on earth, making them the arbiters of justice and equity (Shamash gave Hammurabi the famous law code that served as the model for so much that came after). Sun worship may have reached its apogee next door in Egypt, where Ra, with his sun disk on his head, was numbered the king of the gods, sailing the sky in his solar boat. Pharaohs were considered his sons; the great temples at Karnak and Luxor captured the sunrise at the solstices, and many of the tombs in the Valley of the Kings were aligned toward the setting sun. The shape of the pyramids themselves is likely symbolic of the rays of the sun as they spread down from the heavens.

This region no longer belongs to these gods, of course. Instead it’s firmly in the grip of the various religions of the book — Judaism, Christianity, Islam — which frown on anything even resembling sun worship. And yet, as Freud argues in Moses and Monotheism, there’s a sense in which “modern” religion comes in a direct line from that earlier era — that monotheism really originated in Egypt and that Judaism just dropped the sun. Moses, he insisted, was not Hebrew but an Egyptian follower of a monotheism based on the sun, “who chose the Jewish people to keep alive an advanced ethical and religious belief which the Egyptians were abandoning.”

Scholars don’t accept this version as historical truth, but those of us who grew up with the Bible understand Freud’s deeper reasoning — the sense of light as a metaphor for the divine, the idea that God, like the sun, is a source of life and energy. Yes, the Bible is harsh on idolators: “beware lest you lift up your eyes to heaven, and when you see the sun and the moon and the stars, all the host of heaven, you be drawn away and worship them and serve them.” And yet “Sun of Righteousness” is the name that the Hebrew prophets used to forecast the Messiah.

Though I’m not a preacher, I lead the Christmas Eve services in our tiny Vermont church, and I always make sure we sing “Hark the Herald Angels Sing,” in part for those lyrics:

“Hail the Sun of Righteousness! Light and life to all He brings, Risen with healing in His wings.”

Christmas, in fact, is the reminder that none of our meaningful traditions are ever pure or disconnected from the past. Was Jesus born on the 25^th of December? The Bible doesn’t say, and early accounts — Clement of Alexandria, say — suggest April or May; but there was an existing Roman solstice feast (Saturnalia) and as Constantine was baptized into the new religion customs began to be absorbed. (Cultural appropriation!). In 354 Liberius, bishop of Rome, picked December 25, and for many centuries Christmas continued pretty much as the drunken feast around the darkest days of the year that it always had been (even in the new world the Puritans frowned on Christmas, which they called Foolstide.) It’s taken two thousand years to wring most of the old sunlight out of the day.

But hey, what do you know, the Roman Sun Day became the Christian day of worship. There’s no escaping it. I’m a Christian — a Methodist, the least excitable of all denominations. That means I worship the Son, not the sun: the radical code that Jesus laid out, with its insistence above all on caring for the poor and vulnerable, works for me. But my form of the faith (increasingly remnant in modern America where a cultish and brutal Christianity is now the norm) is perfectly compatible with some low-key reverence for the sun. I am reminded constantly of Francis of Assisi and his Canticle of the Sun.

Praised be You, my Lord, with all your creatures;
especially Brother Sun, who is the day, and through whom You give us light.

And he is beautiful and radiant with great splendor,
and bears a likeness to You, Most High One.

It’s worth noting, in fact, that the last Bishop of Rome took his papal name from that earlier Francis. And when he wrote his overpoweringly radical 2015 encyclical on climate change, Laudato Si, he took that phrase (Praised be You) straight from the Canticle.

As the author of Ecclesiastes (Solomon, at least by legend) put it:

“What has been will be again
What has been done will be done again.
There is nothing new under the sun.”