Literature and Ecotheology: From Chaos to Cosmos challenges us in a time of climate crisis to find more common ground between the dual projects of ecocriticism and ecotheology.
This book argues that in our postsecular age, literature has become an important repository of theological wisdom that can, like formal work in ecotheology, provide the moral grounds for environmental care. However, for any cosmological understanding to be adequate to the challenges before us, it must be responsive to the often-painful contingencies and uncertainties that inhere in the cosmos, something that both ecocriticism and ecotheology have often neglected. After a treatment of the ecocritical and ecotheological questions that pertain to the religious/secular divide, the study then turns to four contemporary American writers—Annie Dillard, Cormac McCarthy, Marilynne Robinson, and David James Duncan —as examples. Each uses the contingency of literary form and its promise of wholeness in order to imagine reasons for hope in light of the unpredictability and untold human and more-than-human suffering that lie at the heart of nature.
The book will be of interest to students, scholars and researchers interested in ecotheology, religious studies, environmental literature, the environmental humanities, and environmental studies more broadly. It offers a needed paradigm shift in how Western societies have tended to misuse both secularity and religion.
Part I: Why Ecocriticism Needs to Get Religion
Chapter One: Literature and Ecotheology
Chapter Two: Literature as Ecotheology
Chapter Three: Literature as Theodicy
Part II: Literary Theodicy in Four Contemporary Examples
Chapter Four: The Duality of Cosmos in Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Chapter Five: The Tale as Cosmos in Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing
Chapter Six: Imagination as Cosmos in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping
Chapter Seven: Syncretism as Cosmos in David James Duncan’s Sun House
Conclusion
Biography
George B. Handley is a Professor of Comparative Literature and the Director of Global Environmental Studies at Brigham Young University, USA.
“George Handley’s wise and generous book urges scientists and artists, political activists and Christians, ecocritics and ecotheologians, to recognize their mutual need, and he proposes imaginative literature as a locus where those who often find themselves at loggerheads might instead cultivate common ground. His perceptive argument exemplifies how personal convictions can inspire rigorous scholarship that illuminates fraught public discourse and helps us imagine ways of caring for damaged communities and places.”
Jeffrey Bilbro, Associate Professor of English at Grove City College, USA
“A thought-provoking book full of deep insights into the finite transcendence of the natural world. While ecological science today is predominately materialist in approach, Handley's 'ecotheology' looks to literature to give voice to the stifled spiritual forces that underlie our environmental anxieties. It makes a lucid case for the pressing need to re-sacralize our relation to nature in its terrestrial as well as cosmic reaches.”
Robert Pogue Harrison, author of Forests: The Shadow of Civilization
"George Handley calls for an end to culture wars that pit secular environmental scholars against ecotheology. The power of environmental literature evokes the transcendence of ecotheology, just as ecotheology needs the earthly grounding of ecocriticism. Both aspire to transform chaos and meaninglessness into hope and moral action. It is time ecocritics got religion!"
Lisa H. Sideris, Professor of Environmental Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
