Climate Theology & Storytelling

This course explores theologies of creation, sometimes called “ecotheology,” via the now sizable body of literature concerned with the growing crises of human-induced climate destruction. As we ask how early twenty-first-century fiction can give us new eyes for both humanity and other creatures, we’ll sample the emotional and spiritual issues raised by these enormous, seemingly intangible problems.

After introducing our own backstories, we will turn our focus to climate science and historical Christian responses, working both to understand the overwhelming consensus and to reach beyond simplistic binaries. Then, with help from an expanding roster of theologians, we will reimagine individual and communal responses to creation’s present groaning—recognizing that there really are plentiful solutions at hand. Finally, we will return to this overarching question: how can literature and popular culture help us to tell this story slant?

Our main dish for this course is Playground, a 2024 novel by Richard Powers, the American author perhaps best known for his magisterial, Pulitzer Prize-winning The Overstory. In Playground, Powers offers a new narrative-puzzle that asks us to rethink our relationships not just to broader ecologies—especially oceanic ones—but also to each other. This novel is about evolution and artificial intelligence, race and class, marriage and friendship, the gods and God. We will follow this with dessert in the form of a little-known Icelandic-Ukrainian film about a church choir director who has finally had it with mindless profiteering. Finally, we will conclude by celebrating newfound relationships and purposes that can extend well beyond Regent and our week together.

Course assignments will encourage students to interact both critically and imaginatively with our material, and may include an option to respond through creative writing.