Political Theology of the Earth: Our Planetary Emergency and the Struggle for a New Public

by Catherine Keller

Overview

Amid melting glaciers, rising waters, and spreading droughts, Earth has ceased to tolerate our pretense of mastery over it. But how can we confront climate change when political crises keep exploding in the present? Noted ecotheologian and feminist philosopher of religion Catherine Keller reads the feedback loop of political and ecological depredation as secularized apocalypse. Carl Schmitt’s political theology of the sovereign exception sheds light on present ideological warfare; racial, ethnic, economic, and sexual conflict; and hubristic anthropocentrism. If the politics of exceptionalism are theological in origin, she asks, should we not enlist the world’s religious communities as part of the resistance?

Keller calls for dissolving the opposition between the religious and the secular in favor of a broad planetary movement for social and ecological justice. When we are confronted by populist, authoritarian right wings founded on white male Christian supremacism, we can counter with a messianically charged, often unspoken theology of the now-moment, calling for a complex new public. Such a political theology of the earth activates the world’s entangled populations, joined in solidarity and committed to revolutionary solutions to the entwined crises of the Anthropocene.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231189910
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	10/30/2018
Series:	Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Catherine Keller is professor of constructive theology at the Theological School of Drew University. Her books include Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement (Columbia, 2014).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Beginning
1. Political: Sovereign Exception or Collective Inception
2. Earth: Climate of Closure, Matter of Disclosure
3. Theology: “Unknow Better Now”
Apophatic Afterword
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

In this brilliant, wonderfully evocative, and beautifully written book, one of the very best theologians in the world today engages seculareligious currents in political theology to remarkable effect. Her theology of divine entanglement counters a political theology of the exception in a thoroughgoing way: anthropic exceptionalism, for example, comes completely undone. Its apophatic dimensions, meanwhile, steer clear of the certainties of optimism or despair to offer a hope without guarantees in the face of climate crisis. No one can question the way social justice and ecological sustainability are inextricably linked after reading Keller’s political theology of the earth.

Kathryn Tanner Kathryn Tanner

Recommended.

Choice

The political, the earth, their theology, encapsulated in a meditation mindful of the unmined mind-bending darkness of the deep, a calming call to think, an urgent call to act in the face of the darkness of planetary peril, all in a lyrical, profoundly theological—make that theopoetic—voice. What else is that than a new book by Catherine Keller? What more could we ask for?

John D. Caputo

Perhaps only Catherine Keller could publish a work of political, theology, process theology, and eco-theology that is also highly readable. Keller is our era’s poet theologian, modeling a way to push through academic jargon and out the other side with prose that pops. For this reason alone, it’s worth picking up this book. . . . Keller makes one of the most compelling cases yet for a progressive theology that doesn’t recede with the overtaking of secularity but is more precisely revealed in the undertaking of it.

The Christian Century - Clint Schnekloth

Keller argues that there is a way of thinking with the resources of Christianity that allows one to hope.

Reading Religion

In Political Theology of the Earth, Catherine Keller, one of the most brilliant and creative theologians alive, opposes the more traditional notion of political theology as dealing with the sovereign exception with her alternative political theology of a messianic ecosocial inception. In doing so, she takes the next step of integrating the important discourses of political theology with the critical ecological situation of the planet. More profoundly, she does this as a theologian, even though most scholars who write about political theology tend to be non-theologians. This is one of the most important works I have read.

Clayton Crockett

[Political Theology of the Earth] calls upon eco-activists to explore the spiritual affinities between us in order to respond to the emergencies of the Anthropocene. This is surely an evocative and thought-provoking book particularly in the current times when the globe faces threats and ideological warfare of various kinds be it terrorism, racism, casteism and gender violence or popular resistance against tyrannical governments among such others.

Aigne Journal

In this brilliant, wonderfully evocative, and beautifully written book, one of the very best theologians in the world today engages seculareligious currents in political theology to remarkable effect. Her theology of divine entanglement counters a political theology of the exception in a thoroughgoing way: anthropic exceptionalism, for example, comes completely undone. Its apophatic dimensions, meanwhile, steer clear of the certainties of optimism or despair to offer a hope without guarantees in the face of climate crisis. No one can question the way social justice and ecological sustainability are inextricably linked after reading Keller’s political theology of the earth.

Kathryn Tanner

[A] galvanizing new book...

National Catholic Reporter

Perhaps only Catherine Keller could publish a work of political, theology, process theology, and eco-theology that is also highly readable. Keller is our era’s poet theologian, modeling a way to push through academic jargon and out the other side with prose that pops. For this reason alone, it’s worth picking up this book. . . . Keller makes one of the most compelling cases yet for a progressive theology that doesn’t recede with the overtaking of secularity but is more precisely revealed in the undertaking of it.

The Christian Century

Keller's political theology of the Earth is breathtaking in the scope of the resources it draws upon and the depths of its analysis...Just read it, and when you fail, enfold yourself into the cosmic process and read it again. That's certainly what I'm going to do.

National Catholic Reporter - Marian Ronan

How is a political theology of the earth distinctive? It resists the hegemony of those theologies (and post-theologies) organized around divine omnipotence, absolute sovereignty, and human dominion over the earth. Doing so, it can now mine rich veins in traditions that explore liveliness beyond the human and human entanglements with a multifaceted, morphing earth. In this inspiring book Keller calls upon eco-activists to explore the spiritual affinities between us, as we foment energies needed to respond to the Anthropocene. An indispensable book for today!

William E. Connolly

Into this contracted spacetime of racist convulsion, ecological disaster, and nuclear machismo, Keller drops a political theology that both introduces and breaks open the field. Framed as a transdisciplinary triptych, Political Theology of the Earth summons an enraged, counter-creative swarm to counter the politics of exception with multifarious practices of inception.

Mary-Jane Rubenstein

[A] galvanizing new book...

National Catholic Reporter - Marion Ronan

With marvelous economy and scholarly brilliance, Catherine Keller offers here the beauty and complexity of her practical wisdom. It is no easy thing to guide others into uncertainty and unsaying as modes of theological and political understanding, let alone an activism that takes seriously the truly vulnerable in and of the earth. This book is an indispensable introduction to political theology, one in which our understanding of divinity can be neither reduced to human politicking nor exempted from the urgent crises of our time.

Laurel C. Schneider