“Foreword” in “Extinction and Religion”
EXTINCTION AND RELIGION? WHAT DOES this distinctive pairing, an anthological first, portend? Your initial reaction to the title might be Well, yes, the mass extinctions now underway do bear a certain analogy to the state of religion. But no, these essays do not belabor the precarious future of religion. They face the greater question—at once more primal and more final—of the death of countless species, just possibly including our own. This is not a question I want, or even quite know how, to face. When writing about ecological degradation through these decades of its intensification, I far more frequently specify climate change than extinction. In this, I am typical of environmental thought in religion or theology. Yet anthropogenic climate crisis comes enfolded in the same period’s extinction spasm. Does the discourse of global warming veil with a certain abstraction the tragic creaturely particularity of extinction? After all, it is extinction, at once so singular and so multiple, that names the embodied effects, the life-or-death stakes, of planetary warming, melting, degrading—hence the unique and manifold importance of this volume.
Extinction and Religion interrogates the meaning of extinction, its epochal particularities, its multiplicities, its worlds. In each essay, “religion” is revealed—differently—as entangled in the human framing and practice of those worlds. It is read variously as driver, prophecy, warning, sanctification, repression, and interpretation of extinction. It has served to justify human causes of extinction or to resist them. Therefore, critical attention to religion’s relation to the interdependent life of all of us terrestrial species pervades the startling richness of these essays. The volume exudes a shadowy beauty: as you read, a saltmarsh sparrow flickers by, a run of salmon swarms along, a melting glacier is mourned. The essays never retreat into tones of scientific neutrality or devolve into a fanfare of the freaky facts. And they have no recourse to a preachy ecomoralism, let alone a promise of providential rescue. Nor do they rehash the familiar denunciations of the Genesis dominion or of Christian habits of otherworldliness. They probe with nuance the sanctifications of a civilization’s deadening use of its own materiality. And they attend also to “the emergence of novel forms of life” (Kidwell, chap. 2). In their varying postsecularity, these essays probe the depths, the grounds, and the collective lives of a process of irreducibly complex materializations. The prehuman history of prior extinctions echoes in the present spasm, where the entwined lives of endangered species, including that of the prime endangerer, signal not just threat but vibrancy. Therefore, the present writhes with widely divergent possible futures—futures that refuse to abstract themselves from wildly different species, inseparable from each other in their fatality and indeterminacy.
Just to raise the question of religion and extinction, however, triggers the signifier of the greatest fatality: Isn’t the apocalypse the ultimate story of extinction? The Christian Bible, that most influential of books, runs from the alpha of creation to the omega of apocalypse. If its prophecy of the collapse of Earth life—a mass dis-creation—is not predictive of our moment, does it function as a self-fulfilling prophecy of doom? I have long queried the apocalypse habit of Western civilization, with its normalization of any level of systemic violence, and for almost as long have recognized the symbolism of imperial power and economic greed that foments revolutionary struggles and leaps toward ecosocial justice. Any apocalyptic signal emitted by the present volume carries the original meaning of apocalypsis as unveiling—disclosure, more interesting than mere closure. As another timely text puts it: “The Anthropocene is the Apocalypse, in both the etymological and the eschatological senses. Interesting times, indeed.”1 Indeed, the Book of Revelation ends neither in The End, mere extinction, nor in a return to Eden, but in a radical urban renewal of the Earth, specific in its multinational polity, its ecology of urban orchard and fresh water “free for all to drink.” There is no total extinction, no utopian guarantee, but a voice of the ancient thirst for a just and sustainable world.2 While the present volume does not get tangled in the apocalypse, Stefan Skrimshire has elsewhere brilliantly captured its conflicting deployments, its resonance with ecological disaster, indeed its capacity to inspire a nonviolent militance as “activism for end-times.”3
Extinction and Religion steers us away from the totalizing question of The End, indeed of The World. Reflections on specific crises and contexts of extinction keep bringing us back to specific bodies buzzing and blurring into each other and so into their specific worlds—into our specific worlds. Perhaps it is this creepy concreteness that makes reflection on extinction now crucial, neither to be boxed under climate change nor to compete with it for attention. The two or three degrees of warming, the quantifiable economic causes, are set to deliver terrifyingly concrete effects on bodies assembled within and across species. And the inverse is also true: the great loss of species life, botanic and zoomorphic, oceanic and terrestrial, alters the atmosphere, affecting its ability to absorb excess carbon and depriving it of the oxygen we breathe. But as this book makes clear, a discourse of extinction can also lock into a numbing abstraction. Our lack of proximity, or of awareness thereof, to threatened species can trap them into codes of fetish or distance.
This volume’s strategy for relating religion to creaturely vulnerability works to undermine that distance—to give flesh to the abstraction-prone data of environmental catastrophe. It sensitively fosters mourning what has already gone extinct. It warns of what may and what will yet go. And it unveils a mysterious persistence and an irrepressible creativity within and on behalf of Earth’s collective of species. Indeed, the dark and disarming eloquence of this anthology invites what it performs: a renewed and renewing attention to our creaturely cohabitation of each other—both human and vastly otherwise.
NOTES
1. Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros Castro, The Ends of the World (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2017), 22.
2. See Catherine Keller, Facing Apocalypse: Climate, Democracy and Other Last Chances (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2021).
3. Stefan Skrimshire, “Activism for End Times: Millenarian Belief in an Age of Climate Emergency,” Political Theology 20, no. 6 (2019): 518–536.
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