Religious Perspectives on Ecological, Political, and Cultural Grief: What Role Is Played by Structural Grief?

1. Grief in a Time of Unmaking

We live in a time of the world’s unmaking: species extinction, climate emergency, democratic deconsolidation, rising authoritarianism, economic instability, pandemics, political polarization, cyberwarfare, geopolitical realignments. The list of disruptions, instabilities, and crises could go on.

It is true that the world is, and has always been, continuously changing. And there has probably never been a generation or historical period that did not think its challenges were unprecedented. But the crises and ruptures in our present world need not be unprecedented to be overwhelmingly distressing, perplexing, and even terrifying. Because of how deeply interconnected the world has become over the past several decades, the crises we face interact, amplifying the risk and compounding the threat of any of them on their own. Moreover, the cultural stories we have told about who we are, how we ought to be, what matters, and why, are unravelling, leading to cultural fragmentation and moral dislocation. Accelerating change, reinforcing crises, and cultural decay generate a profound sense of loss. Thus, to live in a time of unmaking is to live in an age of grief.

But when most people think of grief, they think of bereavement, grief as a response to the death of a loved one: a family member, a friend, or even a companion animal. The death of a loved one is undoubtedly a paradigmatic occasion for grief, and there are as many ways to grieve as there are ways to die. But grief is not limited to death. Many people experience grief in response to non-death losses—an estranged friendship, a divorce, a demotion at work, the onset of illness or disability, a relocation, or the loss of financial stability. These are all grievable events.

Some forms of loss are relational or material; others are collective, cultural, or historical. Cultural erasure, forced migration, colonization, racial trauma—these, too, rupture lives and sever identities. Accordingly, grief manifests in many different forms. It may be anticipatory, emerging before a loss has fully occurred, as in the case of terminal illness or the expected loss of employment. It may be ambiguous, as Pauline Boss has shown, when someone is physically absent but psychologically present (as with a missing person), or psychologically absent but physically present (as with dementia or substance dependency) (Boss 1999). Some grief is disenfranchised, as Kenneth Doka has described, when it lacks social recognition or validation, such as the grief that follows suicide, overdose, or the ending of a stigmatized relationship (Doka 1999).

Theorists have offered a range of frameworks to understand these various experiences. Stage theories, like Kübler-Ross’s Five Stages of Grief (Kübler-Ross 1970), task-based models, such as Worden’s Four Tasks of Mourning (Worden 1991), and process-oriented models, like Stroebe and Schut’s Dual Process Model (Stroebe and Shut 1999) or Therese Rando’s Six R’s of Mourning (Rando 1995), all attempt to trace the trajectory of grief as an unfolding personal experience. While these models differ in emphasis, they all share a common focus: grief as an individual, intrapsychic response to a discrete loss.

Many prevailing theories of grief focus on discrete, personal losses—whether through psychological stages, interpersonal disruptions, or therapeutic processes. These are valuable but insufficient. Grief is not only individual. In a time of accelerating change and systemic, interconnected loss, there is a need to conceptualize grief as a phenomenon that exceeds the interpsychic and personal. Grief can be political, planetary, cultural, economic, and spiritual. Furthermore, grief need not, and perhaps should not, be privatized. It can become a mode of collective agency, engaging the world as it breaks and remakes itself.

2. Toward a More-Than-Personal Theory of Grief

The contributions in this Special Issue advance this theoretical shift to more-than-personal grief by exploring religious perspectives on different forms of systemic loss. Harris brings “assumptive world” theory to an exploration of political grief and religious belief, Pikhala presents a Dual Process Model approach to ecological grief and discusses how religious leaders and communities can shape this work, and Park examines the ideological manipulations and theological forms of political grief in recent South Korean history. Tan discusses forms of loss generated by the hypermobility demanded by capitalism, Snarr shows how religious resources can activate the grief of “moral shock” into social change, and Boscaljon develops “estranged sorrow” as a category of traumatic relational loss resulting from social injustice, the epidemic of loneliness, and other societal realities.

Each article, in its own way, challenges the privatization of grief and offers new frameworks for using religious perspectives to understand loss as a political, ecological, and cultural event. They trace how grief runs through broken democracies and melting glaciers, through state propaganda and sacred stories. They show that grief is not simply a matter of losing someone we love. It is also a response to ruptures in our environments and social worlds. These essays expand our understanding of grief’s scope and significance, yet they do so from distinct disciplinary vantage points, without situating them in a more comprehensive theoretical framework. In this conceptual space between the contributing authors’ richly situated perspectives and the need for a wider synthesis, I propose a new category: structural grief.

3. What Is Structural Grief and Why Does It Matter?

Structural grief conceptually gathers the various elements of this Special Issue of Religions—it is a category that includes and exceeds political, ecological, and cultural grief. In this brief introductory essay, I argue for structural grief as an analytic and spiritual concept. It functions simultaneously as a critical diagnosis of contemporary social life and a prompt for existential and spiritual transformation.

Structural grief is the collectively registered emotional externality of a world-system that sustains itself by producing loss. It emerges not from particular traumas or singular disasters, but from the operative extractivist logic of late capitalist modernity.

Structural grief is not reducible to any single event. It is not rooted in the death of a loved one or the end of a relationship. Instead, it is the emotional wake created by ongoing loss produced by social systems, losses that are often unnamed, ungrievable, and socially disavowed.

Structural grief is an affective response to systemic rather than acute loss, pervasive rather than isolated trauma, and cumulative and chronic sorrow. It is the diffused melancholy of life in a world unmaking itself. Structural grief is an existential and spiritual condition—it tears at the roots of belonging, sunders our sense of time, and ruptures our relation to the sacred.

Structural grief is not merely personal or episodic, but systemic and patterned. It is a form of affective dispossesion rooted in the structures of our social world—particularly the ways that capitalism, racism, patriarchy, colonialism, and ecological destruction generate loss and suffering that is normalized, disavowed, and made illegible.

Unlike conventional ways of thinking about grief, which presume a bounded loss, such as the death of a loved one, structural grief refers to a condition of living amid ongoing, unnamed, ambiguous, and ungrievable loss. It is the emotional externality of the systems that order our lives, systems that sustain themselves, paradoxically, by producing loss. It is a byproduct of the internal mechanics and socioecological effects of an exploitative form of world.

The loss produced by such a world is existential as well as ecological, political, and cultural: loss of time, meaning, identity, and belonging. However, the suffering of loss is socially stratified and unevenly experienced by design. It is racialized, gendered, and classed, an effect of racial capitalism’s production of premature death, stolen time, and epistemic and cultural erasure1. Structural grief follows the contours of structural oppression. Thus, structural grief is the grief of living in systems that cannibalize the future—it names the sorrow of inhabiting a world of selective human and non-human disposability.

Structural grief matters not only because it synthetically encompasses (and exceeds) death-related and non-death loss, existential, collective, political, ecological, and cultural grief. Most importantly, structural grief matters because it restores emotional intelligibility to a world that gaslights its own violence. Structural grief conceptually enables us to see that overwhelm, anxiety, dislocation, disorientation, and exhaustion are not just individual experiences, but a shared affective condition rooted in fundamental structural forces.

Structural grief, in this synthetic frame, is powerfully diagnostic. It illuminates what would otherwise be invisible. It reads what has been made illegible. It discloses what is hidden. Through its critical leverage, structural grief mounts an analytic revolt against indifference to violence and the invisibilizing of loss, and, in doing so, it is an active witness to what matters. It opens a space of resistance. It reveals the shape of a world-system that, by systematically producing uneven loss and engineering socially differentiated futures, is unworthy of its inhabitants.

Structural grief is diagnostic, critical, and activating, but also has a spiritual dimension. By enabling perception and attuning us to loss, structural grief is revaluative. It can potentiate the communal work of revising values, restoring meaning, and building new structures of belonging. As Judith Butler has argued, the act of grieving affirms our interdependence—it is an ethical acknowledgement of shared vulnerability (Butler 2004, 2016). As such, grief can also incite collective capability. Thus, structural grief does not pathologize; it enables perception. In addition to its diagnostic vector, then, structural grief empowers remedy—it can catalyze a re-reading (relegere) of the world and of human and more-than-human life, spiritual transformation, collective action, sacred connection (religare), ethical awakening, pastoral accompaniment, community organizing, liturgical innovation, and myth-making.

4. Interventions into Grief Theory, Affect Theory, and Religious Studies

Structural grief intervenes in grief theory by expanding the concept of grief beyond the interpsychic and interpersonal frameworks predominant in psychology and thanatology. It is informed by the philosophical and phenomenological approaches of Svend Brinkmann, Michael Cholbi, and Matthew Ratcliff but moves beyond their personalistic scope (Brinkmann 2020; Cholbi 2021; Ratcliff 2022). Structural grief develops a more multidimensional framework and critical analysis of systemic loss’s deep sociogenic and culturally licensed causes. Structural grief moves grief theory from a therapeutic into a critical register—it is a crucial confrontation with how the world is constituted by ongoing, cumulative, socially striated, and disavowed human and more-than-human loss.

In affect theory, structural grief integrates dilated and contracted scales of critique, rendering visible the socio-cultural production of loss and the granular, embodied textures of grief. It is a transversal concept, working to undo disciplinary separatisms. Moving across phenomenological and political registers and navigating diverse ecologies of affect, structural grief operates critically in multiple social, existential, ideological, and spiritual zones. Similarly to Ann Cvetkovich’s work on depression, structural grief is a public feeling, a collectively experienced affect of a particular kind of world (Cvetkovich 2012). With Kathleen Stewart, structural grief has an atmospheric quality (Stewart 2007). It is everywhere and nowhere in particular, inescapable and invisible. And structural grief is critically adjacent to Lauren Berlant’s work, but whereas “cruel optimism” describes attachments that block flourishing, structural grief, as a critical and spiritual concept, marks both the decay of habitable futures and a revaluative opening to modes of resistance and repair (Berlant 2011).

In religious studies, structural grief has an affinity with apophatic theology, mysticism, and political theology. The grief in structural grief is not merely an emotional state one experiences passively but can become a spiritual and political practice. As personal grief can be temporally disorienting and ontologically dislocating, the feeling of systemic breakdown marked by structural grief can become a portal to an unknowing and relearning of the world. As mystics move through a ‘dark night’ towards new ways of seeing and being, the experience of structural grief is a creative deforming of our cognitive and affective coordinates. Structural grief thus becomes a liminal experience, an affective condition between the world as it has been given and a counterworld of collective imagination. In political theology, structural grief provides a new critical lens through which to make visible the theopolitical implications of living in a world-system that sacrifices its avowedly sacred commitments—to dignity, community, freedom, the future—on the altars of consumption, accumulation, extraction, and exploitation. Structural grief makes this bad faith sacrifice visible, creating openings for new constructive and critical work in religious studies, ethics, and theology.

5. Conclusions

Structural grief is a synthetic category with powerful diagnostic, analytic, religious, and theological potential. Phenomenologically, structural grief is the collectively felt interior of polycrisis. Critically and politically, it is the emotional externality of a world system that sustains itself by producing loss. Ontologically, it is the diffused affect of life in a time of the world’s unmaking. And spiritually and theopolitically, it is an aperture that allows us to see through the impossible ruins of the world we have inherited to the possibility of a more socially just, ecologically responsible, democratically resilient, spiritually vital counterworld. By theorizing more-than-personal, de-privatized models of grief, the essays collected in this Special Issue help to advance significant shifts in grief studies, affect theory, and religious studies.