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Category: Ecology

The popular ascription of hurricanes, fires, earthquakes and other environmental events as “Acts of God” raises fundamental questions regarding the relationship between human and divine agency, violence, and the prospects and limits of a scientific understanding of the cosmos. From political ecology to environmental humanities to apocalyptic sciences, political theology engages questions of climate change, environmental ethics, the status of nature, the human, and the creature.

Resources

Bibliography:

  1. Catherine Keller, Political Theology of the Earth: Our Planetary Emergency and the Struggle for a New Public (2018)
  2.  Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climactic Regime (2013)
  3.  Willis Jenkins, The Future of Ethics: Sustainability, Social Justice, and Religious Creativity (2013)
  4. Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright, A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future (2018)
  5. Vine Deloria, Jr., God is Red: A Native View of Religion (1973)

Relevant Journal Articles:

  • Nicholas Tampio, “Green Allies: Speculative Realism, Evangelical Christianity, and Political Pluralism,” Political Theology 17, no. 6 (2016): 525-539
  • Stefan Skrimshire, “Activism for End Times: Millenarian Belief in an Age of Climate Emergency,” Political Theology 20, no. 6 (2019): 518-536
  • Elettra Stimilli, “Apocalyptic Time,” Political Theology 21, no. 5 (2020): 391-392
Indigenizing Philosophy through the Land: On the Nature of the Concept

Indigenizing philosophy through the land then is more than a culturally distinct way of philosophizing… it is a process of decolonization in the form of a revitalization of the relational modes of Indigenous life grounded in land as the relational ground of kinship and human beings as grounded in and inextricably entwined with this relational kinship ground.

Indigenous Stewardship and the Death Rattle of White Supremacy

Native peoples in the Americas understand the universe as alive and sentient. All phenomena in it are understood to be a distinct expression of life force, or spirit. Since all persons – human and other-than-human – such as plants, animals, rivers, winds, and mountains are expressions of spirit, they are understood to be interconnected and contingent.

The Coloniality of Wilderness

I am interested in exploring and critiquing the discursive implications of designating this area as wilderness, given the history of this idea and its role in dispossessing Indigenous communities.

“Enemies of Humanity”: Political Theology from the Pipelines

While not often recognized as political theology proper, environmental justice movements have for decades been sites of normative creativity. Sometimes overlooked as conventional rights-based complaints against locally unwanted land uses, these movements have in fact depicted ecologies of white supremacy while deploying rights, sacralizing land, and reimagining the human in ways that would utterly reconstruct the basis of politics.

Healing the Land, Land Healing the Self

We appear isolated. Yet, over the years that we have brought our farm into our family, I have come to see ourselves as part of a worldwide imagined community of small farmers.

Between Ecology and Ideology: Climate Change and Forestation Sciences in Mandatory Palestine/Israel

When did the discourse on climate change begin? How was it related to colonialism? And in what way did it serve political objectives in Israel/Palestine throughout the 20th century?

Contextual crisis analysis

The question for us, and for the field of political theology, is how do we wish to live in the end?

Turkey Trouble in Florida

In Florida and elsewhere, communities facing technological and environmental risks do well to adopt the ethics and politics of precaution.

Embodying Compassion: the Theological and Political Content of Disability

…theologies of disability can aid human flourishing, because caring for people of varied abilities made in God’s image allows us all to create more just and compassionate political systems

Naturalized: White Settler Christianity and the Silence of Earth in Political Theology

The white US Evangelical denialists see something that many other political theologians do not: that taking seriously our ecological relations requires a kind of paganism.

The End is Nigh!

What would it mean to take apocalyptic talk as a sign of the times: as revealing, uncovering, and disclosing something basic about the cosmos? Could such talk be the beginnings of an eco-apocalyptic political theology?

Political Theology and the Intrusion of Gaia

There is, I suggest, a kind of political theology at work in this practice of simply paying attention to (and being provoked by) the transcendence that is Gaia. It generates a form of intellectual habitation that remains attuned to the strange shapes drawn in the clouds by some form of transcendence.