This video began with an email from my friend Mike inviting me to submit a paper proposal for an upcoming gathering of the International Bonhoeffer Society. I am not a Bonhoeffer scholar, but I had written a reflection on Bonhoeffer for an Anglican denominational magazine that Mike thought worthy enough to turn into a conference paper. I submitted the proposal and it was accepted.
When it came time to write, however, I did not feel enthused about turning my reflection into a conference paper. The “moment” for that reflection had passed and I was now in a different space. As it happened, I had just finished teaching an eco-theology subject in which I had assigned Mary-Jane Rubenstein’s fantastic book Pantheologies: Gods, Worlds, Monsters. That book led to me to an essay by Rubenstein titled “Science” which is published in the Palgrave Handbook of Radical Theology. The essay takes Bonhoeffer’s prison writings on “the world come of age” and “religionless Christianity” as a point of departure for articulating the relation between science and radical theology. Rather than try to plug gaps in scientific knowledge with an apologetic appeal to God, Bonhoeffer councils embracing the death of the God who stands outside of the world as its metaphysical explanation. The death of this God allows Christianity to be re-discovered as the ethical practice of “being there for others”[i] in which a relation to God emerges “in the midst of life.”[ii]
Rubenstein’s essay uses this shift to sketch a radical theology of science. She writes, “I would…like to suggest that radical theology intensify the double movement we have just glimpsed in Bonhoeffer. In short, a radical theology of natural science would kill off the metaphysical God wherever he [sic] continues to raise his kingly head and instead seek those traits we associate with divinity—creativity, sustenance, renewal, and transformation—in the manifold, self-subsisting processes of this natural world.”[iii] After reading this essay, I thought, “Here’s an interesting direction to take Bonhoeffer! I wonder how far I could push it.” As part of the eco-theology subject, I had also been reading anthropologist Tim Ingold’s writings on weather which beautifully detail its existential significance as well as modern society’s numbness to this significance. And so, like the sudden formation of strange looking cloud, I had the thought, “What if I read Rubenstein’s Bonhoeffer via Tim Ingold’s ‘weather-world?’ What if the divinity of ‘being there for others’ happens as a weather-event?” This idea grabbed me, and I set to work on my paper, which I titled, “Without God, Within the Sky: The Religionless Ethics of An Animate Weather-World.”
As the conference approached, I became more brazen with my desire to do something creative. It started simply enough. I thought I might have some scenes of weather playing in the background as I delivered my paper. So I started capturing scenes of weather around my house with my phone. This eventually spiraled into creating a video essay with music and a voice-over of the central sections of the paper. At the conference, I read the first third of the paper which covers Rubenstein’s use of Bonhoeffer, and then I hit “play” on the video.
In the version of the paper that I have prepared for publication, I quote Timothy Morton’s idea that “Life as such is the capacity of the universe to have stupid accidents.”[iv] My non-linear journey to this video essay feels like a little string of stupid accidents, the original idea malfunctioning into an ecology of thought that feels richer and, well, more fun.
[i] DBWE 8, 501.
[ii] DBWE 8, 486.
[iii] Mary-Jane Rubenstein, “Science,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Radical Theology, edited by Christopher D. Rodkey and Jordan E. Miller (Palgrave MacMillan, 2018), 749.
[iv] Timothy Morton, Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology (Columbia University Press, 2024), 9.
