Political Theology of The Earth

In a moment of perilous political repatterning, our planetary entanglements emit signals of emergency. Immediate crises of immigration, race and Islamophobia are thrown into competition with the slower temporalities of climate change for progressive attention. With antidemocratic politics rising, what can theology contribute to a timely response? While current “political theology” may only obliquely engage theology as such, let alone the earth, it exposes the secularized sovereignties of the pater omnipotens as ongoing history. Might Whiteheadian and new materialist cosmologies of entangled multiplicity, read along their theological edges, help to trigger –beyond hope for some new sovereign exception– an earth-minded political inception? 

Catherine Keller is Professor of Constructive Theology at Drew University. Her work interweaves process philosophy with an evolving feminist cosmopolitics, engaging questions of ecological, social, and spiritual practice amidst an irreducible indeterminacy. Among her many books are Apocalypse Now & Then: A feminist guide to the end of the world (1997); The Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (2002); God and Power (2005), and The Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement (2014).