Description:
A collection of essays that outline the recent work on ecology, political theology, religion, and philosophy by one of the leading theologians of our age
As we face relentless ecological destruction spiraling around a planet of unconstrained capitalism and democratic failure, what matters most? How do we get our bearings and direct our priorities in such a terrestrial scenario? Species, race, sex, politics, and economics will increasingly come tangled in the catastrophic trajectory of climate change. With a sense of urgency and of possibility, Catherine Keller's No Matter What reflects multiple trajectories of planetary crisis. They converge from a point of view formed of the political ecologies of a transdisciplinary theological pluralism. In its work an ancient symbolism of apocalypse deconstructs end-of-the-world narratives, Christian and secular, even as any notion of an all-controlling and good God collapses under the force of internal contradiction. In the place of a once-for-all incarnation, the materiality of unbounded intercarnation, of fragile yet animating relations of mattering earth-bodies, comes into focus. The essays of No Matter What share the preoccupation with matter characteristic of the so-called new materialism. They also root in an older ecotheological tradition, one that has long struggled against the undead legacy of an earth-betraying theology that, with the aid of its white Christian right wing, invests the denigration of matter, its spirit of "no matter," in limitless commodi-fication. The fragile alternative Keller outlines here embraces--no matter what--the mattering of the life of the Earth and of all its spirited bodies. These essays, struggling against Christian and secular betrayals of the spirited matter of Earth, work to materialize the still possible planetary healing.Brief description: Catherine Keller is George T. Cobb Professor of Constructive Theology in The Graduate Division of Religion, Drew University. She works amid the tangles of ecosocial, pluralist, feminist philosophy of religion and theology. Her books include Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming; On the Mystery; Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement; Political Theology of the Earth: Our Planetary Emergency and the Struggle for a New Public. She has co-edited several volumes of the Drew Transdisciplinary Theological Colloquium, most recently Political Theology on Edge: Ruptures of Justice and Belief in the Anthropocene. Her latest monograph is Facing Apocalypse: Climate, Democracy, and Other Last Chances.
Review Quotes: In one sense or another, all of Catherine Keller's books are about everything. The end of all things; the beginning of all things; the excess and entanglement of God, world, and everything that composes them. But even for those familiar with Keller's everything, No Matter What somehow gives us more: the climate, the quantum, surging nationalisms, Black life, Ukrainian persistence, and the interdetermining breath that makes another way still possible.---Mary-Jane Rubenstein, author of Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race