World Without End

Nonfiction Finalist,Willie Morris AwardsBest of 2025: Top 10Adult,Foreword ReviewsA Garden & GunFavorite Book of 2025For fans of Margaret Renkl and Lisa WellssBelievers,World Without Endcircles the connections between climate change and faith in the fear and fascination of the end of the world.When Martha Parks father announces he is retiring from the ministry after forty-two years, she moves home to Memphis to attend his United Methodist church for his last year in the pulpit. She hopes to encounter a more certain sense of herself as secular or religious. Instead, she becomes increasingly compelled by her uncertainty, and grows curious whether doubt itself could be a kind of faith that more closely echoes a world marked by loss, beauty, and constant change.In illustrated essays,World Without End: Essays on Apocalypse and Afterexplores the intersections of faith, motherhood, and the climate crisis across the South. From man-made wetlands in Arkansas to conservation cemeteries in South Carolina, from a full-scale replica of Noahs Ark in Kentucky to the reenactment of the Scopes Monkey Trial, Park chronicles the ways the faith in which she was raised now seems like an exception to the rule, exploring this divide with compassion and empathy. For fans of Margaret Renkl and Lisa Wells,World Without Endconsiders the ways religion shapes how we understand and interact with the worldand how faith can compel us all to work to save the places we love.