Columbia University Press Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology

"Timothy Morton's aim in Hell is to up the game of ecological theory and praxis, moving away from their data-dumping guilt mode and into the planetary-scale inspirational feel that is the spiritual ecstasy of life itself. Nothing less than such a transformation can convince religious climate-change deniers to give up their passionate beliefs that the comforting support of Jesus can assuage all ills. On Earth hell is marked by the binary of subject/object in all its varieties--gendered, racialized, colonized--all master/slave relationships, the hallmark of capitalism and the Anthropocene--and is evidenced by the twinned theological forms of evangelical religion and scientism. Morton proposes instead that the sacred is the phenomenology of biology--how life from its earliest evolutionary beginnings feels--not subjective inner experience but a way of being in symbiotic relationship, a mood permeating existence. They find resources in visionaries William Blake and Friedrich Nietzsche but also, counterintuitively, in Immanuel Kant, all of whom refused to ontologize science. In hell, by contrast, we are entrapped in the measurable, purposive physical world. Blake above all understood that ideology structures our worlds and that we have to fight hard to change it. The biosphere is driven by unconditioned desire--without a telos--thus queerness, pleasure, beauty, art happen in all conscious (sentient) beings. That surge of life is holy, our birthright, and if not a reason to "save Earth," what could be?"-- Escaping global warming hell, this revelatory book shows, requires a radical, mystical marriage of Christianity and biology that awakens a future beyond white male savagery. Hell on earth is real. The toxic fusion of big oil, Evangelical Christianity, and white supremacy has ignited a worldwide inferno, more phantasmagoric than anything William Blake could dream up and more cataclysmic than we can fathom. Escaping global warming hell, this revelatory book shows, requires a radical, mystical marriage of Christianity and biology that awakens a future beyond white male savagery.Timothy Morton argues that there is an unexpected yet profound relationship between religion and ecology that can guide a planet-scale response to the climate crisis. Spiritual and mystical feelings have a deep resonance with ecological thinking, and together they provide the resources environmentalism desperately needs in this time of climate emergency. Morton finds solutions in a radical revaluation of Christianity, furnishing ecological politics with a language of mercy and forgiveness that draws from Christian traditions without bringing along their baggage. They call for a global environmental movement that fuses ecology and mysticism and puts race and gender front and center. This nonviolent resistance can stage an all-out assault on the ultimate Satanic mill: the concept of master and slave, manifesting today in white supremacy, patriarchy, and environmental destruction. Passionate, erudite, and playful, Hell takes readers on a full-color journey into the contemporary underworld—and offers a surprising vision of salvation. Autorid: Timothy Morton