Faith after the Anthropocene

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue grows out of a symposium held at Brigham Young University in September 2019. We quote here from the symposium abstract, which we adapt for this Special Issue:

This symposium addresses the vulnerability associated with our ecological condition—but less the vulnerability of the earth per se than of how the earth’s precarious state reveals our own vulnerability and prompts us to new ways of thinking and being. The Anthropocene, of course, designates the earth in a state of transformation, cataclysmically so, in response to human activity; but is it possible to imagine ourselves transformed for the better as a function of the ecological peril our planet faces? How might our consciousness of gathering catastrophe incite changes in us that help us redress the deeper conditions of which the Anthropocene is a symptom? We are especially compelled here by the thought of how our vulnerability—on the one hand, in the face of ecological disaster and, on the other, the transformative thinking this condition requires—inspires us to reconceive our place in the cosmos, alongside each other and, potentially, before God. “Faith after the Anthropocene” refers to ways our current condition of sober novelty, of generative catastrophe, modify our beliefs and practices, both religious and secular. Who are we “after” (the concept of) the Anthropocene? How might we project and approach the horizon of our existence? What forms of thought and structures of feeling might attend us in this state? How might we determine our values and to what do we orient our hopes?

In some respects, we take our lead from Bruno Latour, who, in a recent essay, proposes three territorial constructs—Globe, Land, and Earth. He deems Globe and Land illegitimate inasmuch as they correspond with typical left/right distinctions (globalization versus nationalism, science versus tradition, progressive versus conservative, utopia versus Heimat, etc.). His point is that modernity cannot remain on its current course—there is no “Globe,” there is no “Land”—so we must learn to think differently. Faith, whether taken affectively or institutionally, will play a crucial role in formulating a theory and habitus of Earth; and Earth, in turn, will impact whatever we mean by faith. Thinking of those two together is the object of this Special Issue.

While the effects of the new climatic regime are certainly global, our focus in this Special Issue is especially on western expressions of Christian faith (including its transformation or disappearance, which are both aspects of its vulnerability). This Special Issue, in other words, is focused on the way in which communities and intellectual traditions shaped by the Christian legacy are responding to the new conditions of universalized precarity brought on by the Anthropocene. We acknowledge, of course, that global and interreligious perspectives are urgently needed, but we hold that these are best realized when they engage with rich, local conversations rooted in particular histories, traditions, and cultures. By doing some of that more local scholarly spadework, we hope that the contributions in this Special Issue may, in their own particular ways, help to prepare the ground for some of those larger, more global conversations in the future.

Over the last decade, the idea of the Anthropocene has become increasingly important to scholars working broadly in the field of the environmental humanities, not least for those thinking about questions of religion and ecology. Representative works here include Clive Hamilton’s The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis: Rethinking modernity in a new epoch (Routledge 2015), which collected important responses from scholars throughout the humanities, and Celia Deane-Drummond, Sigurd Bergmann, and Markus Vogt’s edited anthology, Religion in the Anthropocene (Cascade Books, 2017), which was among the first volumes to thematize the religious response explicitly. Despite these and other efforts, there remains a tremendous amount more to be said, both because the magnitude of the challenges presented by the Anthropocene is so great and because constant change is one of its defining features. We do not yet know what sorts of flourishing, community, and organization will see us through these times. Accordingly, our Special Issue seeks to continue the task of reflection necessary if we are to respond constructively—or, as Hannah Arendt might put it, politically—to the geological realities now confronting us. So many of our efforts more recently to deal with the environmental crisis seem to have looked for solutions in literally out-of-this-world technologies, on the one hand, and globalized bureaucracies, on the other, when what we so desperately need to engage is the vulnerable task of thinking about what we are doing, where we are, who want to be: to think in other words about the common good, the common ground. This is why our Special Issue has chosen to focus on the vulnerability of faith in the midst of the Anthropocene, for this very vulnerability may be the site for the sort of renewal we so desperately need.

Prof. Matthew Wickman
Prof. Jacob Sherman
Guest Editors

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• Anthropocene
• Christianity
• religion and ecology
• faith
• vulnerability
• Latour
• environmental humanities
• ecotheology