Abstract
The philosophy of religion and emerging discussions of the Anthropocene have barely taken notice of each other. This chapter engages recent work by critic Roy Scranton, postcolonial novelist Amitav Ghosh, sociologist Bronislaw Szerszynski and multi-species anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose to explore what role the philosophy of religion of the future might play in a world where the vertiginous loss of long taken-for-granted futures leaves us in an uncanny territory haunted by Holocene ghosts and spooked by Anthropocene monsters. It is suggested that the philosophy of religion’s understanding of histories and traditions of interpretation can free great text humanisms from paleological thinking, but that this will require relinquishing the illusory comforts of secular modernity’s immanent frame. Discerning the spectres of a post-secular present may lead philosophy of religion into conversation with speculative futurological fiction and with the environmental humanities’ experiments in mourning and making kin of our fragile more-than-human world. The chapter ends with some prognostications about how Anthropocene reframings of agency, temporality and the significance of the human might reshape traditional philosophy of religion topics like the problem of evil (and a revived problem of good), and may draw provocative new meanings out of classic philosophical and religious texts such as the Book of Job.
[Gaia’s] blind and implacable transcendence is what specifically questions our own tales and refrains. Our world, which retroactively presupposed she would remain the stable support for the Olympian Gods, and for the Humans who expelled those Gods from the scene, is already part of the past, even if we do not know what that means.
Isabelle Stengers (2014, 5)
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Notes
- 1.
Geologists’ not quite linear approach to history is helpfully explained in Zalasiewicz (2017).
- 2.
“The Dithering” is the name given the period 2005–2060 in Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel 2312 (2012).
- 3.
Exception is made for ancient polytheisms and presumably timeless indigenous traditions. Representative is the “Manual” to Klingan et al. (2014), which jumps from the gods of Greece and Rome to Giordano Bruno with no more than a subordinate clause referring to monotheism.
- 4.
I am grateful to my colleague McKenzie Wark for introducing me to the challenges and importance of making sense of the Anthropocene.
- 5.
Scranton credits Peter Sloterdijk for this understanding of the vocation of the philosopher.
- 6.
Scranton (2015a) argues that Zen Buddhism helps us face the most difficult question: “how will we choose to live out our inevitable failure?”
- 7.
Cf. Bhagavad Gita 18.20, Proverbs 20:27.
- 8.
The phrase appears in Updike’s review of Abdel Rahman Munif’s Cities of Salt.
- 9.
For “buffered” and “porous” selves see Taylor (2007), 27–42. Disconcertingly, the otherwise exquisite essays commissioned for the tenth anniversary of the Taylor-inspired SSRC website “The Immanent Frame,” responding to the prompt “Is this all there is?” barely notice the non-human world, let alone its anthropogenic travails. https://tif.ssrc.org/category/is-this-all-there-is/.
- 10.
- 11.
With Thom van Dooren, Rose proposes a “lively ethography” in place of ethnography, premised on the fact that humans are not the only players in our shimmering world of interaction who have “ethos.” See Van Dooren and Rose (2016).
- 12.
See Howard Morphy, “From Dull to Brilliant: The Aesthetics of Spiritual Power among the Yolngu,” Man, New Series 24/1 (1989): 21–40, qtd. in Rose (2017), 53.
- 13.
It may be no accident that this manifesto is the work of settler descendants in Australia, who feel (as settler descendant North Americans too rarely do) that the fit between modern “civilization” and nature – the land – was always forced.
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Larrimore, M. (2021). Learning to Do Philosophy of Religion in the Anthropocene. In: Eckel, M.D., Speight, C.A., DuJardin, T. (eds) The Future of the Philosophy of Religion. Boston Studies in Philosophy, Religion and Public Life, vol 8. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44606-2_9
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