Christian Theology and Ecological Grief: Sorrow for the Earth

This book invites the Christian tradition to participate in an urgent and rapidly developing area of enquiry: the significance of human feeling in a time of climate crisis and global ecological collapse. This book invites the Christian tradition to participate in an urgent and rapidly developing area of enquiry: the significance of human feeling in a time of climate crisis and global ecological collapse. The author turns, in particular, to climate and ecological grief and mourning, proposing that the theological frame of sorrow helps illuminate the moral and political weight of such experiences. This book introduces four ways that Christian theology has thought about the passion of sorrow, each providing a touchpoint for approaching anthropogenic loss: love, moral formation, compassion, and resistance. The author argues for the particular theological significance of human feeling towards non-human creatures, proposing that sorrow reflects human knowledge of creation as a gift; other creatures offer themselves to us and demand that we human creatures offer ourselves in response. When sorrow for the earth is therefore offered in prayer and in public, it not only helps us to see non-human creatures with new eyes but also radically reimagines our understanding of what it means to be human. This volume will be of particular interest to scholars of theology, religion, and the environment.