Before reading this book, I had never encountered any Christian theology that made me want to be more like a plant. This Sacred Life fills readers with awe at the creaturely world to which we belong and calls us to pay attention to its intricate rhythms. Traditionally, the doctrine of creation has not done much work in western Christian systematic theology, often serving merely as a scenic backdrop to the drama of human redemption. Theological anthropology has tended to center its attention on what makes humans different from other creatures. Wirzba emphatically reclaims the sacredness of our creaturehood in the Anthropocene era. From Ukraine to Myanmar, from the brutality of factory farms to the ravages of environmental racism, we see all around us the violence and suffering we humans have inflicted on our earthly home. We have structured our personal, political, and economic lives in selfish, abusive, and unsustainable ways. Wirzba calls attention to the deep connections between justice for human beings and justice for fellow creatures and the land. His book is both a lament and a lyrical summons to a transformed life in our meshwork world.

Christians have developed ways of reading the Bible that have undermined serious theological attention to our creaturely identity and have at times legitimated our abuse and degradation of the land and fellow creatures. Wirzba is especially critical of readings that portray our eschatological hope as an escape from earth. The biblical wisdom books seem to me a neglected resource for Wirzba’s argument. The theological horizon of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Job is creation. Their focus is not on a lost paradise or a heavenly future, but on cultivating wise creaturehood in the present. Human wisdom is patient, attentive discernment of the character and patterns of creaturely life as God has given it. We ignore or flout those patterns at our peril. Those who seek Woman Wisdom find life. Those who foolishly ignore her ways find death. As Wirzba notes, “It takes discipline and skill, along with long periods of attention and commitment, for people to discern where beauty and vitality are happening, and what the conditions are that precipitate fragmentation and needless destruction” (88). This kind of slowly acquired knowledge is at the heart of biblical wisdom. God gives us earthlings a lifelong vocation to pursue it.

All wisdom ultimately comes from God, but the human search for wisdom in these biblical books is a broad one. In Proverbs and Job, non-human creatures like ants, badgers, locusts, mountain goats, and hawks display wisdom that can aid human creatures in their quest for a wise way of life. As Job counsels, “Ask the beasts and they will teach you” (Job 12:7). Similarly, Wirzba asks us to learn from plants and from the soil what it means to live a rooted life: “plants are our indispensable teachers because they show us how mistaken we have been about the world we otherwise think ourselves to be in” (88). The search for wisdom requires a receptivity and teachableness that subverts our assumed earthly hierarchies. The Anthropocene era forces us to confront in new ways the old folly of being “wise in our own eyes” (Prov 12:15) and to reconsider who counts as our neighbor.

Biblical wisdom also displays what Carole Fontaine calls “an intellectual ecumenism,” a willingness to share intellectual resources across boundaries of culture and religion. This is especially true in the case of Egypt and Mesopotamia, the motherlands of wisdom in the Ancient Near East. One of the pronounced features of current ecological reflection is its deliberate cultivation of conversation and collaboration across many different religious and cultural traditions. As a recent publication puts it, “Living Earth Community” requires wisdom from “Multiple Ways of Being and Knowing.”1 Wirzba likewise recognizes that Christian and Jewish resources do not have all the answers (and have at times been a significant part of the problem), and he thus draws on indigenous and other traditions. The wisdom we need to find humanity’s proper place in a wounded world will have to come from multiple sources.

In our own time, activists and ecologians like Wirzba are perhaps the voices closest to the biblical sages. They share the same sense of moral urgency about the communal cultivation of a wise and just way of life. They warn us of the terrible consequences of ecological folly. Indeed, the stock characters in the book of Proverbs all feature in Wirzba’s book. The wise, like Chief Coon Come, know that “our land is our memory,” and acknowledge “the vast networks of relationships that inspire, nurture, and complete” our lives (107). By contrast, the wicked, driven by greed and the desire for power, pillage the earth and enslave its peoples. The scoffers deny the depth of the earth’s distress, trusting in the power of human ingenuity or the promise of a far-off heaven to come to our rescue. The lazy know they should change their ways, but find their current consumerist lifestyle too convenient to give up. Wirzba reserves his special scorn for fools: the transhumanists, who dream of a “posthuman” physical invulnerability on earth, the futurists who pin their hopes on the colonization of other planets, those who yearn for a “frictionless life” courtesy of smart techno-social systems. Their folly is their attempt to reject the finitude intrinsic to creatureliness, the interdependence of our meshwork lives.

I have noted various ways in which themes in biblical wisdom bolster Wirzba’s argument. However, there is an important dimension of biblical wisdom that does not fit well within Wirzba’s theological narrative: biblical wisdom recognizes two kinds of creaturely death, while Wirzba really makes room for only one. Both biblical wisdom and Wirzba condemn the death caused by human sin and evil. This kind of humanly instigated death produces both biological death and the deathly life of alienation from God and fellow creatures. Wirzba joins the wisdom books in repudiating the death-dealing ways of sinful humanity—the many ways we choose death instead of creaturely flourishing, both for ourselves and for all our relations. 

Biblical wisdom also recognizes that suffering and death not due to human sin is a steady state feature of creaturehood. These books are resolutely honest about the fact that the creaturely life given and lovingly sustained by God is perishing life, life that is intertwined with death from beginning to end. As Ecclesiastes declares, “There is a time to be born and a time to die. A time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted” (Eccl 3:2). Of course, Wirzba knows this—he is a gardener after all. As he writes elsewhere, 

In the work of nurturing plant and animal life, people come into intimate contact with the powers of death as the matrix in terms of which life’s potential unfolds. Gardens are places where people learn that death is not simply an end to life but a vital ingredient and partner in the furthering of life. Put simply, there is no fertility without the deaths of countless bodies entering the ground. It is a humbling, even terrifying, thing to acknowledge one’s dependence on the deaths of others.2

There is no way to sustain our own creaturely lives without consuming, and thereby destroying, other creatures. Even vegans kill to eat. The problem is that in This Sacred Life this acknowledgement of what we might call “garden-variety death” is strangely muted. Wirzba ridicules the transhumanist contempt for human “finitude, frailty, and need” (36). He criticizes the tendency of modern western medicine to see death as “an enemy that must be resisted, at whatever cost and with whatever means, as long as possible” (54). In a lyrical passage, he declares that “we unself into birds, trees, parasitic worms, and sooner or later, soil; beyond species and individuals, we open to the community from which we are made” (87). This is a poetic way of saying we all die. But in general, Wirzba prefers to rhapsodize about “the ongoing fertility and fecundity of the world—the miraculous character of its ever-fresh natality” (142), without acknowledging the suffering and death on which all this fecundity depends. It would strengthen Wirzba’s theology of creaturehood to draw on a biblical strand that affirms both God’s “unending, abiding attention and love for [earth’s] most quotidian elements” (153) and the ambiguity of a God-given creaturely life vulnerable to disease, predation, and decay. Without serious theological attention to garden-variety death, Wirzba’s depiction of our creatureliness ends up skirting a major dimension of it. 

There are four main elements in Wirzba’s theology of creaturehood. First, there is God’s gift of sacred life that pulses through every place and every creature. Second, there is death and suffering resulting from human violence and neglect. Third, there is God’s promised transformation of the earth and all its creatures. As he writes elsewhere, “it is essential that the material world be transformed, so that in all of its characteristics life can flourish and flower. This is what love demands. It would be a contradiction for perfect love to live side by side with degradation, disease, and death.”3 And fourth, there are our good faith efforts to join with God now in healing the world. 

This theological narrative leaves me wondering about the fuzzy great horned owlets in my neighborhood. To my delight, they have started branching, leaving the safety of their nest and making their precarious way to adjacent limbs. For now, they are still dependent on their mother’s hunting. But soon they will fledge and become fearsome predators like she is. Are they part of the beautiful harmonium mundi Wirzba revels in? Does their predatory existence testify in its own way to “the primordial truth of being—givenness, graciousness, generativity, and goodness” (140)? Or does it testify instead to a fallen and wounded creaturehood that needs healing and purifying? What place will my neighborhood owls have in Wirzba’s eschatological vision of a new earth with no more suffering or death? Will they no longer hunt? Will they no longer reproduce? 

I worry that by neglecting garden-variety death, Wirzba’s theological narrative does not leave enough room for embracing “THIS sacred life,” the one God gives us now. God calls us to gratitude for and sustained attention to the rhythms and patterns of our carbon-based creaturely existence. This includes acknowledging, with Elizabeth Johnson, that “once life emerged there never was a literal garden of Eden or a paradise on this planet where death did not exist. Once nervous systems developed, there never was life without pain.”[/footnote] Elizabeth A. Johnson, Ask the Beasts: Darwin and the God of Love (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 184.[/footnote] I agree with Wirzba that earthly life is precious and that “the essential work of God’s followers is that they join with God in the healing of this wounded world” (154). But there is no stepwise progression from our efforts at healing our world to a new earth “devoid of death, pain, and crying” (142). God’s promises of consummation require a transformation of creaturely life that is unimaginable (to us). 

The Community Supported Agriculture folks I hang out with are some of the most morally serious people I know. I doubt that their theology would pass muster with Wirzba. Their worldview is closer to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s earthly “covenant of reciprocity” than to any theistic notion of transcendence. Their future hope skews closer to Pema Chödrön than to Jürgen Moltmann. I admire the way their acknowledgement of the interdependence of creaturely life and death neither blunts their outrage at human degradation of the earth nor dampens their efforts to heal a wounded world. I have learned a lot from them about what it means to affirm “this sacred life.” As I bring my Christian theological resources to our shared work, I hope that they will also learn from me. Reading Wirzba’s book has deepened the resources I have to offer.

There is a popular genre of environmental writing that begins with a litany of disasters: catalogues of rapidly deteriorating biodiversity, inventories of increasingly disastrous weather events, statistics presaging a massive climate refugee crisis—all the signs of the ecological apocalypse. The litany is meant to jolt the reader awake and prepare her to act. But to act how, exactly?  

Warning against treating creation as a “a problem to be solved,” Pope Francis exhorts his readers instead to approach creation as his namesake did, “a joyful mystery to be contemplated.”1 According to Francis, if we see the world primarily in terms of problems, then we act as masters over creation, assuming the same posture of domination and reiterating the same centering of human activity that led to those disasters in the first place.2 Better, for the saint and the pope, to approach the world first as a site of beauty, a source of wonder, an invitation to praise. 

Norman Wirzba’s This Sacred Life is written very much in the spirit of this Franciscan wisdom. Like the Francises, he even presents a way of looking to plants as inspirations for life in the world. Where Pope Francis narrates Saint Francis’s habit of leaving part of the garden wild, uncultivated for human use, to simply in its beauty call the mind to God, Wirzba’s own vegetative meditation interprets Jesus’s exhortation, “Consider the lilies,” as an injunction to learn from plants something about what it means to be human (77). The lilies and the wild plants exemplify the excessive beauty, wisdom, and wonder in the world, and at the heart of This Sacred Life is an affirmation of such abundance, which guides Wirzba’s engagement with our environmental catastrophe more than the problems, violence, and poverties that currently beset creation. In what follows, I want to appreciate the gifts of such an approach that understands the natural and the sacred together before asking two questions about whether and how it might account for the more unnatural impulses in Christianity.  

Wirzba’s book unfolds from the conviction that the world that is beautiful, that it is a gift, and that it is fitting to who and what we are as creatures. When he gives attention to what he calls the woundedness of the world, it is not through a litany of catastrophes but by a narration of how we became the kind of creatures who could wreak the kind of havoc on the world we have wrought. By telling the environmental crisis as a story of abundance betrayed, Wirzba can trace connections between it and myriad other crises of our time, casting the story of ecological devastation as a thread in a narrative that interweaves the desecrations of colonialism, racism, labor exploitation, and nationalist violence. They are all, in Wirzba’s telling, part of the story of denied abundance, sacrality, creatureliness. 

While attending to creation and the givenness of this sacred life, Wirzba frequently tracks towards the various ways of showing fidelity to this sacredness, especially through art. Vincent van Gogh, Makoto Fujimura, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Scott Cairns, and Gerard Manley Hopkins all make appearances in the last chapters as Wirzba evokes music, poetry, novels, and visual art to issue a call to creativity. As the breadth of these examples suggests, This Sacred Life is an extremely generous book—connecting disparate conversations and weaving a disciplinary meshwork that models for the reader the meshwork Wirzba sees in creation itself. 

Meshwork is a key descriptor in This Sacred Life. For Wirzba, we are in a meshwork, and we are a meshwork, from the microbes that co-constitute our gut to the trees that make our world habitable to the many other creatures whose sustenance is entwined with our own. “Human life,” Wirzba writes, “is always life together with other creatures” (75). It is life with and it is life in. Specifically, it is in a particular place, “soil-birthed and soil-bound,” (69) rooted, which is Wirzba’s other major model for human life. With this picture of human life as enmeshed with and rooted in creation, Wirzba’s call to action, when he does make it, issues in the language of tuning and attuning to the activities of the world around and within us. To describe the ethical life through attunement is both to frame human activity as responsive to, with, and in the activity of other creatures, and to suggest that there is an art to creatureliness, which his last chapter “Called to Creativity” draws out. 

Wirzba presents a beautiful picture of human life—one that is ecologically attuned and oriented toward creaturely flourishing. There is so much richness to the natural world in this account that it is hard to see what may lie beyond it. Even the terms “sacred” and “divine” point us emphatically back to the natural. As Wirzba puts it, “To speak of the sacred is to speak about a depth dimension that calls people into postures of gratitude that acknowledge the giftedness of life, and that inspires them to practices of care and nurture as the most fitting response to gifts having been received” (139). This seems an important corrective to theologies of an otherworldly sacred whose weight crushes the significance of ecology and the natural world. Yet I wonder how this vision accommodates features of Christian life, like asceticism and martyrdom, that are not obviously ordered toward natural flourishing. How exactly do they fit into this account of the sacred life? 

Certain kinds of asceticism fit neatly within the world Wirzba describes. There is an asceticism in which observing constraints opens up abundance, for restraints, he rightly argues, are internal to creativity. One cannot play a guitar, Wirzba points out, with infinite frets (27). He even commends “unselfing” as a critical aspect of life, before qualifying: “It is important to say that by ‘unselfing’ I do not mean self-denigration or self-destruction. Instead, I have in mind a self-opening disposition that is focused on and stays turned to the many ways that the creatures and processes around us are working themselves out in our bodies and lives” (87). This unselfing that is ordered to ecological and natural flourishing, that recognizes life is always life together and our becoming is always creaturely co-becoming, has a clear place in the world Wirzba opens for us. But what about forms of asceticism that are not so obviously ordered toward flourishing?

I’m thinking again of Francis, the saint this time, and his asceticism that was earthed in a deep love for this meshwork world, but that sometimes seems, on the face of it, contrary to flourishing in any natural sense. It is an asceticism that twins martyrdom, asceticism for love of God committed to solidarity with the least of these, those with whom Christ himself identified. Francis often had no very stable shelter nor food supply; he kissed lepers and drew near those who were ill. His asceticism was oriented to the promise of a future, eschatological life together, in which we are all invited guests at Christ’s wedding banquet, and so, like many saints, he consciously drew near death to lay hold of an abundance uncaptured by this life or the natural world. In his life, it seems, the sacred does not merely confirm the natural; it also, in some sense, upends it. And I wonder, then, about the differences in the two anecdotes about how plants are teachers for Wirzba and Francis. Where Wirzba interprets Jesus’s exhortation to consider the lilies as an invitation to learn about human life from plants, Francis sees the wild part of the garden raising the mind above creaturely realities to God, like natural incense drawing creatures to their maker. I point this out not because I think Wirzba and Francis are irreconcilable but because I want them to be reconcilable, and I’m hoping Wirzba can show me how, on his terms, they are.

This issue I raise about the sacred and the natural is kindred to another issue of Christianity’s nearness or farness to denials of the natural. One particularly insightful moment in the book came for me early on, in the chapter on transhumanism, when, after describing some transhumanists’ plans for more life and their discontents with the world, Wirzba points out that their hopes are, in a sense, not new, and he turns to the Phaedo to show how Socrates’s celebration of death as freedom from the flesh shares important similarities with transhumanists seeking freedom from their bodies (39-41). He marks some important differences between Plato’s text and the transhumanist manifestos, too, but the similarities were nonetheless striking and made me wonder more about Christianity’s complicity in this vision as well. Might transhumanism express, not just a repudiation of a Christian attitude toward the world, but something about the commitments internal to Christianity itself? I think of Gregory of Nyssa’ text On Virginity, which begins with the desire for immortality, echoing Diotima’s speech in Plato’s Symposium, and then ends with a call to follow the Crucified Lord, which is supposed to in some sense answer to while also transforming the desire for immortality. Might we find similarities between transhumanism and Christianity’s hope for the resurrection? Might we even discover positive homologies with or technologies of transhumanism, such as the way disability advocates and crip scholars orient bioenhancement imaginaries and technologies toward equity, justice, and diverse flourishing?3 Is there still more reckoning for Christianity to do, more complexity, temptation, and possibility, with transhumanism? Is the relationship with transhumanism both more intimate and more ambivalent than Wirzba explores?

My questions about asceticism and transhumanism are not unrelated questions, as I have been trying to suggest. Both are questions about how the large place given to the natural in Wirzba’s world can accommodate Christianity’s imbrications with the unnatural, the way all of this affirmation of life and the natural world and creaturely flourishing answers to a religion centered on a call to imitate the Crucified. How might the abundant and beautiful picture of the sacred life Wirzba paints contain within it proximity to its own betrayal, to the cross, and to the eternal Life it can, for Francis, signify but never contain?

Norman Wirzba’s otherwise wonderful book, This Sacred Life, starts off with a “nonetheless” I could not get over. The following comments ask whether Professor Wirzba fully meant the “nonetheless”—in which case the issues I flag here become increasingly salient, or whether he did not in which case I’m making a mountain out of a molehill (a possibility I fully accept). The “nonetheless” in question relates initially to his rejection of the term “Capitalocene” and ultimately to matters of method and how theologians go about the business of describing the world, including its problems and any remedies they might propose. My thought here is that theologians have been tempted to describe material problems in surprisingly immaterial ways. Often, they do so under the banner of a “cultural logics” approach (and it is notable that “logics” comes up often in the book) that introduces a false distinction between culture and its material production. Culture and the material features of a culture go together, like whenever (as Professor Wirzba describes throughout the book) material processes serve to culturally desacralize the world. As he says, “This is a world in which our engagement with places are mediated through switches, buttons, credit cards, and screens, all from within the comfort of climate-controlled offices and homes” (104). My wonderments about his book can be summarized as wanting to know how seriously Professor Wirzba takes these “switches, buttons, credit cards, and screens.”

Theologians sometimes overstate the role of culture by telling causal stories that make it seem like culture arrives sui generis and then makes material things happen. In this story, cultural beliefs all on their own bring about material states of affairs.  Bad theological beliefs—say, about the earth—effectuate bad behavior toward the earth, in turn leading to bad consequences for the earth. There is undoubtedly something compelling about this kind of story, since it puts human ideas in the driver’s seat of history. Humanists love this story, in part because it positions them to challenge bad ideas with better ideas, something they are uniquely suited for. If bad theological ideas about the earth led to bad practical consequences for the earth, one need only come up with better theological ideas to effectuate better outcomes. This kind of story, and this kind of theology, often comes with a view of theological doctrines abstracted from their material contexts (for an example of an alternative approach, especially as related to climate change, see Philip Jenkins’ recent book about how climate change throughout Christian history directly influenced Christian ideas). Against bad sui generis theologies one need only throw up better sui generis theologies, timeless principles counterpoised in a Platonic contest of “eternal ideas.” 

Such methodologies are especially surprising when they come in the name of Christian theology. The doctrine of the incarnation—connected to doctrines of creation, salvation, eschatology, etc.—affirms that the materiality of the world matters for how Christians describe God, that God cannot be understood by worldly creatures except in the terms of the world (that terms need to be analogically predicated of God simply proves the rule). God, the most unworldly of entities, submits Godself to the world and so comes to be understood in (according to the tradition, “condescends to”) its terms. Scripture puts it this way, “The Word became flesh and lived among us.” Discourses that seek to describe the world theologically should accordingly engage matters in terms of what Merleau-Ponty (someone not unfamiliar in Wirzba’s phenomenologically-inflected corpus) called “the flesh of the world”—by which he meant the world in all of its boundless materiality and bodiliness (e.g., those “switches, buttons, credit cards, and screens”). Another way of putting all this is to say that describing the world theologically first comes with describing it accurately. For theology, right descriptions (and their attending judgments) aren’t important; they’re all important. The work of theology, exemplified by theologians like Norman Wirzba, traverses the rough ground of the world—say, its concrete operations—resisting the gnostic tendency of allowing its complexity to scare one off. 

Those seeking to understand things culturally, then, will want to examine how culture gets conventionalized through complex interplays between concepts and the material realities concepts avail to those who conceptualize (i.e., speak, or as Stanley Cavell puts it, “word”) the world accordingly. This requires surveying the ordinary ways we talk about material realities like soils, political economies, human psychologies, etc. Such realities are no more understood without concepts than are concepts effective without answering to such realities. Concepts and facts go together. So do, as Merleau-Ponty was especially good at showing, perception and action (Merleau-Ponty can be read as responding to Kant’s concept-focused transcendental critique of “pure” reason by saying, “Yes, but don’t let Descartes’ hands overdetermine you; we are in fact bodies”). In the whirl of human practical reasoning, which is what goes into the human life in language, one cannot think culture without thinking materiality. Accordingly, Wirzba’s cultural-logics statement, “Once a strictly instrumental and utilitarian calculus is established and goes to work, the destruction and death that follow in its wake can be readily justified” (129), might be reversed to say, “The destruction and death makes necessary the formulation of a strictly instrumental and utilitarian calculus.”

Professor Wirzba no doubt knows all this. Which is what makes an early “nonetheless” all the more curious. The “nonetheless” in question occurs early when he first entertains and then rejects replacing “Anthropocene” with “Capitalocene.” In entertaining the replacement, he initially gives credence to the idea that understanding the Anthropocene as “the age of humanity” requires understanding the specific role capitalism plays in those determinations. Without something like “Capitalocene” on board, one will miss how these determinations specifically come about, who bears responsibility for them, and what responding to them entails. Along these lines, Professor Wirzba gives particular attention to the roles played by race and racialization in order to draw out a hugely important analogy between what humans—again, specific ones under the spell of capital—do to the earth and to one another. The point here is to say that while humans as such have contributed in a determinative way to the current state of the planet, it is important to carefully describe those determinations by paying attention to their concrete operations. Racialization introduces ideologies of race that conventionalize capital running roughshod over land and bodies. Wirzba provides evidence for these determinations through the material histories of capitalism, such as when steam power replaces hydropower, with ensuing effects on land and labor and the eventual rearticulation of property as a novel political economic innovation. Wirzba’s account of racialization—i.e., the conventionalization of race through racial capitalist material processes—powerfully shows the interplay between concepts and material reality that I earlier suggested sits at the heart of properly Christian theology. 

But then in comes the “nonetheless.” Let me quote the offending passage in full: “This brief narration is enough to demonstrate that the term ‘Capitalocene’ is, in several respects, an important improvement on the Anthropocene because it enables a more fine-grained analysis of changing political, racial, and economic contexts that privileged a small group of (white) people at the expense of many others. Nonetheless, the term is inadequate because it tempts us to think that modernity is the time when people first became agents capable of geologically significant change” (14, emphasis added). Notice the subtle shift that occurs when Professor Wirzba portrays “Anthropocene” as a concept meant to explain the primary determinants of significant geological change, with his rejection of “Capitalocene” having to do with the fact that humans long before capitalism contributed to such change. But isn’t “Anthropocene” meant to capture not geological change as such, no matter how significant, but change of the kind that now brings the world to the brink of collapse? The question the Anthropocene raises isn’t simply when humans started significantly affecting the earth but when and how that significance rose to the scale of an extinction-level event, such that the point of invoking beginnings (say, intramural debates about how to date the arrival of the Anthropocene) has everything to do with endings (say, how things have turned out). If the issue at hand is merely investigating when humans started significantly influencing things then one could identify the advent of human civilization and call it a day by saying all that follows amounts simply to differences in degree, with more civilization leading to greater degrees of damage. It then becomes difficult to establish a difference in kind between humans burning forests for hunting purposes and humans systematically doing so at industrial scale. And if this is the story then it becomes hard to make an evaluative statement about either (i.e., that one is definitively better or worse than the other) other than to say that the latter becomes the inevitable consequence of the former. This finally amounts to saying that the current global warming crisis became inevitable as soon as humans found fire, further having the effect of removing moral culpability from those who changed the order of things by mechanizing the process for the sake of abstracted notions of capital.

Just as there are moral consequences for the “nonetheless,” so there are theological consequences. The Anthropocene > Capitalocene formulation that suggests “humans have always done this stuff” parallels a theological story where sinful humans qua sinful always do sinful stuff. Just as the moral story puts everything on humans and civilization, so the theological story puts everything on sin. But in Christian theology, sin as an explanatory concept works within intentionally narrow confines. What it cannot do is explain away sin, as if to say, ascribing to some sorry state of affairs, “The sin did it!” This kind of explanation makes it seem like human actors could not have done any differently than they did, making them indeed less than actors. In fact, the Christian doctrine of sin presents exactly the opposite picture. It begins with a doctrine of creation that comes with a developed theory of action, where insofar as humans were created from and for good, they act, insofar they act, for and toward goodness. Acting toward evil is in fact no act at all; willing evil does not will; it is a distortion of human willing, the contraction of human action. There can be no Christian story where humans could not have chosen something other than evil. Insofar as they can choose/act/will at all, they intend the good. There may be significant costs that come with that choice/act/willing, but it remains an option. Sin as an explanation then amounts to relating the gory details of why humans act against the good when they could have chosen otherwise. And doing this requires theologians to get into the weeds of any particular human action or set of human actions (for a great—and literal—example, see 69–76). In the case of the current climate crisis, we need to pay attention to the determinations that put humans in particular places doing particular things, always with the possibility of doing good while resisting evil. “Sin” then comes as a retrospective judgment about how evil ensued rather than good. Sin doctrinally cannot be used to preclude those investigations and their attending evaluations. 

The specification named by “Capitalocene” then does significant moral and theological work, and rejecting it the way Professor Wirzba’s “nonetheless” does (i.e., I’m less concerned with the rejection than the reasons given for it) precludes that work, work the rest of the book often, and admirably, performs despite the early refusal. “Capitalocene” and similar specifying notions (recall Austin’s point that the concepts populating human life are not arbitrarily chosen but comprise distinctions humans find useful for navigating the world) help makes sense of the world by recounting the particular choices particular people, many of whom considered themselves Christian, made on the way to bringing Earth to the brink of collapse. The point here is not simply properly assigning blame, disaggregating specific humans from humanity as such. More so it is to tell a story that comes with normative evaluations about how things turned out, and to trace out possible lines of redress given that things could have turned out differently. This is the kind of work I’m imagining when I portray theological description as all important, and the kind of work (call it “specifications of the world in which we find ourselves”) we cannot afford to preclude (which we do once we give up the distinctions “Capitalocene” critically introduces). 

For example, a thoroughgoing account of capitalism’s effects on the current state of things helps us assess certain capitalist-driven remedies on offer. I recently heard David Wallace-Wells—whose The Uninhabitable Earth painted a particularly grim picture of things—striking an unexpectedly optimistic note regarding renewable energy becoming more profitable than fossil fuels. Wallace-Wells was suggesting that we have reached a tipping point where the market can save us just as it previously doomed us. It’s an interesting proposal. And a controversial one (does it propose, on Wirzba’s terms, something “friction-free” (60) or does it sit uncomfortably within his salutary account of work, making, and sympathy (218–35)?). As both interesting and controversial, the proposal requires getting into the weeds to assess it. The question I have been asking is whether Professor Wirzba meant his “nonetheless” or not, and hence whether the kinds of material attention a theology as incarnationally-minded as Christianity is can help us think through the problems we are facing, and the possibilities that remain.

Soil, in its complexity and in its fragility, in its liveliness and in its mystery, is at the root of what’s sacred in This Sacred Life. We are reminded that in the Book of Genesis, it is from soil that human beings are first formed, a relationship embedded in the Hebrew term for human being – adam—and Adamah, the word for ground. Wirzba’s God is “a gardening God—knees on the ground and hands in the dirt” who “scoops together and shapes soil into a recognizable human form” (64). Given these origins, for Wirzba “[h]uman beings do not merely relate to the soil from time to time or as occasionally needed. They are soil that has been fashioned to have the forms and powers that define human life” (66).

Working as both metaphor and substance, soil provides the answers to the deceptively simple questions that animate This Sacred Life, because “it is by studying a life of the soil, its vulnerabilities and possibilities, and by attending to the life and death that comes in and out of it, that human beings come to know who they are, where they are, and how they should live” (66). In its humility and immediacy, soil is the ultimate teacher of the collective and “self-unreliant” nature of all life, of our core dependence on soils and their communities. We learn this not as mere observers of soil, but “by entering into a relationship with it, and from out of that experience discover its characteristics and ways of being” (68). The book therefore illuminates the value of work with the soil, the feeling of reciprocity that can emerge through the process of tending plants, and, specifically, growing food. Agriculture at any scale can open up these modes of thinking and being with others.

My own work is very much alive to and inspired by the question that Norman poses: “If people were to dig into the land, and make a serious study of what they encountered, what would they learn? (72)” For Wirzba, this encounter between people and land teaches us that “participation in the complex life of the soil…is not optional or sporadic, but necessary and continuous” (73). That our lives are shot through with the boundary-defying complexities of something as seemingly simple as dirt reveals to us what miracles we live among. More than most at a university, I’m grateful to be in contact with this mystery, and to have what the text calls “creatureliness” in my daily work. As a farm educator, I’m able to facilitate the kind of human/soil encounters that Norman describes. As a faculty member in the environmental humanities, I work with students both in the field and in the classroom to be in relationship with land they will never own and soils they are unlikely to ever settle near. At the Duke Campus Farm, I’m part of a small team that works with hundreds of students each year to restore Southern soils and their human and more-than-human communities in the wake of the Plantationocene. We see positive impacts on the land and people we work with, and this gives me courage, even delight. Our farm creates a context in which students can imagine, and build, a restorative relationship with the non-human world, a form of active and practical hope imperative to the challenges that climate change poses.

But if I’m honest, I am very much aware, and very much afraid, that these are insufficient responses to the crisis at hand. We work to repair because it’s the right thing to do, and at an elite university, we have this luxury. We work to repair as a way of learning how to grow food in broken places because there will be more and more of these. But is this any match for the overlapping crises that climate change presents? “Hope in a wounded world” has real limits.  Can we intensify, amplify, or scale these kinds of attunements to the non-human, through agriculture or other means, or is this a contradiction in terms? If this work takes so much time, so many hands, is work with the earth at best a strategy for adaptation, rather than reversal or even mitigation, of the immense challenges posed by climate change?

The landscape I work also confronts me with the limits of regenerative soil work, miraculous as it may be, in healing divided human communities. The ground that we farm is part of a former plantation that enslaved at least thirty-six people and likely many more. The wrecked soils that we came to in 2010 bear witness to this history of extraction – over two-hundred years of commodity agriculture that wrested a cruel maximum from the land and those who worked it. I’m aware, and have been called into conversations that have made me aware, that we are already farming on someone’s apocalypse, that apocalypse is old news to many. In the words of Occanneechi Band of the Saponi elder Vivette Jeffries-Logan, we work “the dust of the bones of [her] ancestors.” American farmscapes are made of beauty and miracle and also of dispossession, enslavement, and suffering, legacies that soil regeneration can only go so far in redressing. Wirzba calls for a move from a contractual to a “covenant sensibility” that recognizes that we live entirely by and through gifts, and through the relationships that these gifts create and sustain. Citing Lewis Hyde, Wirzba acknowledges that “[t]he transformation [of the recipient by the gift] is not accomplished until we have the power” to share the gift in turn, “on our own terms” (242). What would it mean for farmers, already so embattled, to acknowledge that however generous we may be or become, whatever relationship to plants, soils and pollinators and all members of our foodshed we might forge, the founding wound of land theft and enslavement in the United States still festers? For those of us with the good fortune of having land to steward, of being emplaced, who is it that has made room for us? Are we aware of who and what have been pushed away or aside? To be authentically covenantal, we would need to fully acknowledge this movement and loss, in a way that sees this both as a wrenching facet of the human condition and allows all of us, giver and receiver, to be more truly generous, to give and receive on our own terms. 

As a farm within a liberal arts context, at a university with no formal course of study for agriculture or food studies, I see our work at the Duke Campus Farm is in large part to create what Bruno Latour calls “Terrestrials” or terrans—people who have a felt sense of where they are, a sense of the humans and not-humans with which they dwell, able to witness the diminishment of the land we’ve been given over both geological and human timescales, with a willingness to work toward, in Latour’s words, a true “taking into account [of] a larger number of beings, cultures, phenomena, organisms, and people” that was the (broken) promise of globalization. 

The “terrestrial” feels distinct from This Sacred Life’s framing of the “creaturely” insofar as to land within this framework, to have a place of origin, is not a given. For Latour, “There is nothing more innovative, nothing more present, subtle, technical, and artificial (in the positive sense of the word), nothing less rustic and rural, nothing more creative, nothing more contemporary than to negotiate landing on some ground” (Latour, Down to Earth, 53). The operative word here to me is “negotiate.” It takes negotiation to land, to find a way into the place in question and its communities. And there is less and less room for us to land. Less and less space for all of us. Not enough land that is not degraded. Less and less of us who are from any particular place. No room for everyone to have the standard of living that many of us consider to be non-negotiable. 

There can be a kind of cruel optimism, to use Lauren Berlant’s phrase, in many a sunlit vision of small-scale agriculture that takes landing for granted, that posits dwelling as fundamental to stewardship, for soil or for places. It’s clear to me that fidelity in our relationships to land can and does sustain our intimacy, and by extension, our care, for soil and for places. And yet, permanent land tenure, even temporary land access, are available to increasingly few, and it’s counterproductive to continue to hold this, implicitly or explicitly, as the ideal. While it’s true that “the ready endorsement of mobility, along with the abandonment and negligence that are often mobility’s accompaniment” have often been “a disaster for the Earth and a diminishment of our humanity,” we need to rethink the injunction to “stay put and sink down roots” (80).  Dwelling has become a luxury that few can afford. Climate change is altering the conditions of life for those able to stay put. The ideals of permanence and dwelling, while tantalizing, become practical and affective dead ends. We need to find alternate modes, timescales, or rhythms for developing these kinds of much-needed intimacies with the places that we are, and the communities that enliven these places. For these reasons, an ethos of situatedness rather than rootedness, of one’s landing place as a site of negotiation, ultimately seems more life-giving, and more adaptive, in a climate-changed world.

With these limitations in mind, I’m grateful to continue to explore with Wirzba and others what an orientation toward the creaturely, or the terrestrial, would look like within the university. How can we bring the work of the body alive within institutions that have traditionally privileged the life of the mind? And if climate change is actually, in Margaret Atwood’s words, “everything change,” and we have decades, rather than centuries, to adapt, we should be radically altering how and what we teach. Along with our students, we are living in a critical time and place, with the collective capacity to change our current trajectory on climate. What, therefore, would a new pedagogy for the Anthropocene look like?

The longer I’ve taken part in the life of the mind, the more certain qualities in people and their writing stand out, like curiosity and energy. My soul tends to drift away from those who never ask questions—from those who have answers, but who rarely seem to inquire or seek to understand. When it comes to energy, my whole “being” feels drained when people bring unresolved conflicts, unexplored tensions, and unprocessed anxieties to their personal interactions. What a treat, then, to be in the presence of positive and curious energy, and an open embrace of life and all of its potential, both of which suffuse This Sacred Life.

One does not have to agree with all of Wirzba’s reasonings to be enthralled by the beauty of his explorations of what a fuller, more connected life can, or perhaps should, be. In a troubled and frantic world that so often seems fundamentally disconnected, reading about “this sacred life”—the inherent interconnectedness of all living things, the importance of networks, of un-selfing—feels, well, not just good, but right. Wirzba’s book is one of those surprisingly rare works that does more than just invite a fascinating conversation. As a reader, one almost feels tossed and pulled into thinking deeply and widely—and, in the process, led to raise provocative inquiries. 

Below, I want to probe only a few of these provocations as a standing invitation for many longer conversations with Norman, and with other interlocutors, perhaps best over coffee, wine, and meals. As his work suggests, after all, intellectual work done in community is always most engaging.

The Sacred Materialist

Throughout This Sacred Life, the reader finds artfully crafted explorations as to how place and condition shape and inform how people think and feel—and not solely about self and others, but also about values, aspirations, and identity. Wirzba returns to this again and again. In chapter 1, he writes that “person and place can no longer be thought apart from each other” (25). In the final chapter, he returns to this theme in writing, “people, in other words, do not exist apart from their places but grow out of them” (227). And once more, at the very end of the book, he states, “a particular thing is what it is because of all the other things that have intersected in it to enable its coming-to-be” (231). Such an understanding of life as essentially rooted and informed by place, time, and circumstance is not very different from the contention of perhaps the most famous materialist, Karl Marx, who once memorably observed that “people make their own history, but they do not make it under conditions of their own choosing.” I should quickly add, however, that I find Wirzba’s rendering of life as situated in and informed by its material roots quite a bit richer and more beautiful than Marx’s—in no small part because it is also informed by indigenous and non-Western wisdoms that include notions of flow, mindfulness, love, and, perhaps above all, responsibility toward the common good.

A key concept Wirzba develops throughout the book is “creaturely condition,” by which he presumably means a life rooted in place and community (20). He juxtaposes this original condition to what has come to be a pervasive modern reality—namely, a kind of disrespect that, in his words, “is readily seen in the…conversion of people, animals, fields, forests, and watersheds into units of production to be harvested as cheaply and efficiently as possible” (20). Those who fully inhabit the “creaturely condition,” as understood by Wirzba, would instead “trust that God provides the gifts one needs to live, and that one does not need to take the world by force” (194). Beautiful, yes, but here arise the first of many inquiries: What would such trust and accountability really entail? What, in modern human communities, would be its origins? Pressing further, how would Wirzba respond to what appear to be his own doubts about the foundations of this kind of trust? In chapter 6, for instance, which treats the logic of creation, Wirzba refers to the work of two scholars (Mary Evelyn Tucker and Brian Swimme) who have made attempts to build religions based on a scientific understanding of the world. After describing their wide-ranging aims, Wirzba concludes: “I support [their] ambition. My question, however, is whether or not the Universe Story can deliver on producing these good aims” (157). My mind immediately begins to wonder: Can the same question be raised about Wirzba’s work? I support the ambition behind This Sacred Life, but can God and the creation story deliver on producing Wirzba’s good aims? And why, in his own telling, has it done such a poor job at doing so up to this point in history? 

Progress—or not?

My second question is informed by some reflections on this concept of “progress,” so central to modern discourse, yet so elusive, even deceptive. Throughout This Sacred Life one often finds the claim—expressed almost as a taken-for-granted afterthought—that humanity has “clearly created improved living conditions and unprecedented levels of comfort” (8). Further, “there is no doubt that the exercise of freedom…has brought many benefits to our species” (23). Applying Wirzba’s own criteria of the creaturely condition, I wonder: What is the evidence for this progress? To put it differently, and to return to Wirzba’s own question: “[W]hat might freedom look like if its aim is to honor the embodied, nurturing, and vulnerable contexts through which people live? Can we imagine and create a shared world, held in common, and committed to honoring the sanctity of life and the dignity of all people?” (19).

Some of this imagining has been done by a burgeoning anthropological and historical line of research on foraging societies—a recent explosion in literature on the way humans lived for more than 90 percent of their existence. One quite radical conclusion emerges as a possibility in the work of authors like Chris Ryan or the late David Graeber, which, in describing life in foraging societies for the first three hundred thousand years of human history, is close to the opposite of what Hobbes famously described as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Indeed, many foraging cultures may come much closer than modern societies to what Wirzba has in mind when he speaks of the creaturely condition. Given the scattered record of progress, and the possibility that the very idea of progress can be upheld only when ignoring or downplaying the violence and destruction it leaves in its wake (or perhaps was its necessary precondition), what, in the end, does Wirzba have in mind when he speaks of comforts, benefits, and progress? And what elements of this progress are equally implicated in the North American history of stolen land that was worked, so often, by enslaved people, and rationalized by the epistemological frameworks of monotheistic religions? If one were to hold on to that notion of progress, what is the path forward to a reality of real progress not premised on the wide-ranging destruction This Sacred Life so vividly details?

Transactional vs. Relational

Deep into the book, Wirzba asks “what recommendations can be made that would better facilitate a person’s participation in the flows of a receiving and giving life?” (240). His answer is that we need to try to move from “a contractual to a more covenantal way of negotiating our relationships with others” (240). Translating this into language with which I am more familiar, I understand this as a call to deeper connection to others and the world that is not transactional, but rather relational. If so, count me in. It’s a beautiful vision. And yet, as someone who studies the history and logic of economic systems, I wonder: As much as I agree with Wirzba’s recommendations—including the four building blocks intended to sustain relationships and revitalize democracy—what, in the end, can it accomplish if we are still part of an economic system whose logic inherently and voraciously turns everything and everybody into marketable commodities for the sake of profit and growth? Aren’t we in danger of simply becoming passengers who stick our hands out the window in an attempt to stop the train from driving off the cliff? If I am part of a system—indeed, if I cannot be understood as separate from it, as Wirzba suggests throughout his book—should we then not pay primary attention to the very systemic forces that so often turn me, turn us, into transactional humans trampling the commons we depend on?

Anthropocene—“cene,” Yes; “anthropo,” Perhaps Not

Wirzba makes a very persuasive case for ditching the term Anthropocene in favor of Capitalocene. As he states, “the world we currently find ourselves in was shaped, and continues to be remade, by a colonial ambition to capture and extract from the earth and its communities whatever wealth there is to be found” (14). This is as good and concise a definition of capitalism as I know. In the end, however, Wirzba rejects the idea of replacing Anthropocene with Capitalocene based on what seems to be the argument that large-scale destructive impacts of human endeavors on land long predate capitalism. But isn’t this a little like saying traffic fatalities cannot be blamed on cars, for people died on streets prior to the invention of the automobile? Strictly speaking, yes it is. But if the name we give to an entirely new epoch puts an undifferentiated anthropos, or human, at the center of the story rather than the nature, logic, and ideology of an extractive colonial system, don’t we end up missing major causes in favor of a directionless yet comfortably inclusive term? Following Wirzba’s persuasive critique, my vote continues to be for Capitalocene. 

Dominion, Domination, Stewardship

By training, I am a political economist and historian, not an expert in religious studies or theology. The next question might best be understood with that caveat in mind. Wirzba claims that the early Christians rejected the idea of absolute private property. How does that sit with an understanding of a God that presumably created the earth (predating the natural environment), and from which others have deduced that God has dominion over the land, perhaps not unlike the way that modern property owners think about the private domain (viz., seeing land as serving a purpose, and in a way that is exclusive, serving some while denying others)?  In large part, Wirzba seems to follow Lynn White’s central argument in his famous 1967 essay “The Historic Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” which states that “what people do about their ecology depends on what they think about themselves in relation to things around them.”1 White seems to conclude that the Judeo-Christian tradition is profoundly implicated in causing our escalating environmental crisis. Does Wirzba’s logic lean in the same direction? Or does he find arguments like White’s to rest on faulty understanding?

Back to the Roots: The Foundations of Ethics

And, finally, a question not rooted in expertise but unavoidable as I read. Wirzba points to God as the origin, or, at a minimum, the foundation of an ethics of sacred life. This, to me, seems deeply unsatisfactory. I’ve struggled with figuring out what to call myself—an animist, a secular humanist, an atheist. None of these terms seem adequate; much less do they get to the larger and inevitable question: Is the source of the sacred life internal or external to us? If Wirzba is correct in arguing that everything from poverty to depletion and science have emerged because of human creations, isn’t the same necessarily true of God? Who, if not humans, have created sacred stories? To be clear, I have no interest in making a case for a purely secular future. There seems little doubt that traditions and communities fashioned around historically specific religious practices have resulted in many things, good and bad. 

My question here is more focused: When we seek to understand the origins of what Wirzba calls “the sacred,” and what I would call—somewhat more ascetically—the good, how does it help to imagine, or posit, its origin as something external to us? Something that is not also another human invention? Put differently, why try to get around what, at least in part, seems to be the core message of This Sacred Life—that we need to see ourselves as part of a bigger, interconnected and marvelous natural world? Wirzba locates our best hope, and perhaps our responsibility, in figuring out peaceful ways to live—to live with each other as much as with other living organisms. In some ways, he poses one of the oldest philosophical questions: Are we capable of governing ourselves? And I wonder, can we do so without relying on an external authority? For even if we assumed such an authority existed, what it represents, what it would ask us to do, would still be up to us to decipher. Why not, therefore, start with us?

These provocations have been a joy to write, as they come in response to a work crafted by a person deeply immersed in and highly adept with humanist and theological traditions. Given the unprecedented range and depth of challenges that we earthlings face at this moment in history, Wirzba serves as a valuable and inspiring guide. 

Reading through This Sacred Life also encouraged me to dig up again a wonderful little  seventeenth-century folk poem. Here is to you, Norman.

The law locks up the man or woman

Who steals the goose off the common

But leaves the greater villain loose

Who steals the common from the goose.

 

The law demands that we atone

When we take things we do not own

But leaves the lords and ladies fine

Who takes things that are yours and mine.

 

The poor and wretched don’t escape

If they conspire the law to break;

This must be so but they endure

Those who conspire to make the law.

 

The law locks up the man or woman

Who steals the goose from off the common

And geese will still a common lack

Till they go and steal it back.