This third volume of the series on “An Earthed Faith” focuses on creation theology. The ten invited essays address the following core question: “What difference does it make to the story of cosmic, planetary, human and cultural evolution to re-describe this as the creative work of God’s love?” Inversely, what difference does it make to the story of God’s love to describe it in evolutionary and geographic terms? Addressing this question requires theological reflection on place (land, geography and landscape) and on evolution (cosmic, biological, hominid and human) as the story of such place. This entails a narrative reconstruction of the story where current interests, positions of power and fears are necessarily at stake (the place where the story is being told), often dominated by issues of race rather than by grace. How, then, is this story to be told, given such a sense of place?

This volume will entail a highly constructive effort to address the classic tasks associated with creation theology at the cutting edge of contemporary ecotheology.

Copyright (c) 2024 Ernst M Conradie, Willie James Jennings (Volume editor)

In this visionary and inspiring third volume of the “An Earthed Faith: Telling the Story amid the ‘Anthropocene’” series, an ensemble of leading international ecotheologians from various geographical locations and confessional traditions retune the story of God’s creative love to reflections on place, drawing on geography, biology, indigenous creation stories and the wisdom that comes from inhabiting and caring for the land. Foregrounding the experiences of inhabitation by peoples marginalized by capitalist colonial regimes and attending to a plurality of earth-stories, this groundbreaking scholarly book significantly refractures the colonial framing of most theologies of creation. This important, path-breaking work opens new vistas for how to do ecotheology in a decolonial key.

Hilda P Koster, Regis St. Michael’s Faculty of Theology, Toronto School
of Theology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada