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Faith After the Anthropocene Faith after the the after Anthropocene Faith • Matthew Wickman and Sherman Jacob Faith after the Anthropocene Edited by Matthew Wickman and Jacob Sherman Printed Edition of the Special Issue Published in Religions www.mdpi.com/journal/religions Faith after the Anthropocene Faith after the Anthropocene Editors Matthew Wickman Jacob Sherman MDPI • Basel • Beijing • Wuhan • Barcelona • Belgrade • Manchester • Tokyo • Cluj • Tianjin Editors Matthew Wickman Jacob Sherman BYU Humanities Center California Institute of Integral Studies USA USA Editorial Office MDPI St. Alban-Anlage 66 4052 Basel, Switzerland This is a reprint of articles from the Special Issue published online in the open access journal Religions (ISSN 2077-1444) (available at: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions/special issues/ Faith Anthropocene). For citation purposes, cite each article independently as indicated on the article page online and as indicated below: LastName, A.A.; LastName, B.B.; LastName, C.C. Article Title. Journal Name Year, Article Number, Page Range. ISBN 978-3-03943-012-3 (Hbk) ISBN 978-3-03943-013-0 (PDF) Cover image courtesy of Andrew Seaman. c 2020 by the authors. Articles in this book are Open Access and distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, which allows users to download, copy and build upon published articles, as long as the author and publisher are properly credited, which ensures maximum dissemination and a wider impact of our publications. The book as a whole is distributed by MDPI under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND. Contents About the Editors .............................................. vii Matthew Wickman and Jacob Sherman Introduction: Faith after the Anthropocene Reprinted from: Religions 2020, 11, 378, doi:10.3390/rel11080378 ................... 1 Lisa Dahill Eating and Being Eaten: Interspecies Vulnerability as Eucharist Reprinted from: Religions 2020, 11, 204, doi:10.3390/rel11040204 ................... 7 Mary Frohlich The Vulnerable (Post) Modern Self and the “Greening” of Spiritual Personhood through Life in the Spirit Reprinted from: Religions 2020, 11, 194, doi:10.3390/rel11040194 ................... 19 John Gatta The Saving Grace of America’s Green Jeremiad Reprinted from: Religions 2020, 11, 172, doi:10.3390/rel11040172 ................... 31 Whitney A. Bauman Returning Faith to Knowledge: Earthlings after the Anthropocene Reprinted from: Religions 2020, 11, 169, doi:10.3390/rel11040169 ................... 43 George B. Handley What Else Is New?: Toward a Postcolonial Christian Theology for the Anthropocene Reprinted from: Religions 2020, 11, 225, doi:10.3390/rel11050225 ................... 53 Jacob Holsinger Sherman Reading the Book of Nature after Nature Reprinted from: Religions 2020, 11, 205, doi:10.3390/rel11040205 ................... 65 Timothy Robinson Reimagining Christian Hope(lessness) in the Anthropocene Reprinted from: Religions 2020, 11, 192, doi:10.3390/rel11040192 ................... 77 Lisa H. Sideris † Grave Reminders: Grief and Vulnerability in the Anthropocene Reprinted from: Religions 2020, 11, 293, doi:10.3390/rel11060293 ................... 89 Willis Jenkins Sacred Places and Planetary Stresses: Sanctuaries as Laboratories of Religious and Ecological Change Reprinted from: Religions 2020, 11, 215, doi:10.3390/rel11050215 ...................105 v About the Editors Matthew Wickman is Professor of English and Founding Director of the BYU Humanities Center. He is the author of The Ruins of Experience: Scotland’s “Romantick” Highlands and the Birth of the Modern Witness (U of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), Literature After Euclid: The Geometric Imagination in the Long Scottish Enlightenment (U of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), and numerous articles that span across various humanities disciplines. His current work explores the relationship between literature and spirituality, with particular emphasis on the multiple forms and expressions of experiences of ultimate value. Jacob Sherman is Professor and Chair of the Philosophy and Religion Department at the California Institute of Integral Studies. He taught previously at King’s College London and the University of Cambridge. In addition to numerous articles and essays in philosophy, theology, and religious studies, he is the author of Partakers of the Divine: Contemplation and the Practice of Philosophy (Fortress Press, 2014), and editor, with Jorge Ferrer, of The Participatory Turn: Spirituality, Mysticism, Religious Studies (SUNY Press, 2007). He is currently working on a new manuscript addressing the theological, philosophical, and ecological aspects of ‘The Book of Nature’. vii religions Editorial Introduction: Faith after the Anthropocene Matthew Wickman 1,* and Jacob Sherman 2 1 English Department, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT 84602, USA 2 Philosophy and Religion Department, California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco, CA 94103, USA; [email protected] * Correspondence: [email protected] Received: 7 July 2020; Accepted: 20 July 2020; Published: 23 July 2020 Abstract: This is the introductory essay to the Special Issue “Faith after the Anthropocene” published in Religions 11:4 and 11:5. How does the Earth’s precarious state reveal our own? How does this vulnerable condition prompt new ways of thinking and being? The essays that are part of this collection consider how the transformative thinking demanded by our vulnerability inspires us to reconceive our place in the cosmos, alongside each other and, potentially, before God. Who are we “after” (the concept of) the Anthropocene? 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? Faith, a conceptual apparatus for engaging the unseen, helps us weigh the implications of this massive, but in some ways mysterious, force on the lives we lead; faith helps us visualize what it means to exist in this new and still emergent reality. Keywords: Anthropocene; ecocriticism; faith; vulnerability; environment The articles in this Special Issue began as invited papers at the Brigham Young University (BYU) Humanities Center symposium “On Being Vulnerable, Part II: Faith after the Anthropocene,” held at Brigham Young University, Utah, in September 2019. This meeting was the logical, more thematically capacious and ethically urgent, follow-up to the symposium sponsored by the BYU Humanities Center the previous year, titled “On Being Vulnerable: ‘Crisis’ and Transformation.” During that first meeting, a number of speakers reflected together on how retrenchment has become a dominant reflex of the humanities during vulnerable times, exacerbating the feeling of crisis from which the impulse toward defensiveness is designed to protect us. When we and our disciplines are rendered vulnerable, how do we respond? In addressing this question we took a cue from Hannah Arendt, who argues in The Human Condition that only actions of the most vulnerable kind—self-disclosing, interpersonal, and unanticipated; lacking defense of precedent or certainty of outcome—achieve lasting effects.1 Arendt associates such actions with speech and writing, drama, music—in short, with the arts and humanities—and contrasts them with displays of strength that fortify institutions and bolster economies but ultimately do little to cultivate the human spirit. In effect, she provides a model for the humanities after an era of “crisis,” when humanities disciplines are increasingly portrayed as indefensible and when their greatest chance for survival, ironically, may depend on how their proponents embrace that very trait. The symposium from which this Special Issue was born represented an amplification of this theme, addressing the vulnerability associated with our ecological condition. Our focus, however, was less the vulnerability of the Earth, per se, than how the Earth’s precarious state reveals our own—how it prompts us to new ways of thinking and being. The Anthropocene, of course, designates the Earth in 1 See (Arendt 1958). Religions 2020, 11, 378; doi:10.3390/rel110803781 www.mdpi.com/journal/religions Religions 2020, 11, 378 a state of transformation, cataclysmically so, in response to human activity. However, is it possible, we asked, 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 were especially compelled by the thought of how our vulnerable condition, ecologically and existentially, inciting 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 those ways that our current condition of sober novelty, of generative catastrophe, modifies 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? However we answer those questions, it seems to us that faith plays a central role. We define faith, with Paul, as “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen” (Hebrews 11:1, NRSV). Such assurance typically pertains most directly to confessional
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