Political Spirituality in the Face of Climate Collapse

This book takes its motive force from our contemporary climate crisis. It seeks to reorient human (and especially Christian) understanding, towards a more ecologically-focused, indigenously-informed way-of-living. James W. Perkinson argues that our current eco-climatic and socio-political emergency is the culmination of a 5,000-year history of supremacist "e;settlement,"e; in which city-states first emergent in Mesopotamia and Egypt not only begin coercively organizing labor into surplus production and ecosystems into inordinate and destructive yields of "e;goods,"e; but in the process, also simultaneously "e;deform"e; the Spirit-World "e;haloing"e; of natural phenomenon into outsized service of imperial reach. Perkinson recognizes globalized humanity as an emerging monstrosity destroying both human culture and the world. How we re-envision and revalue, at our critical juncture, our inescapable interdependence with the more-than-human world as peer and teacher and even "e;elder,"e; is the central theme that throbs below the surface of the very disparate topics commanding attention in each chapter.