Literature and Ecotheology: From Chaos to Cosmos (Routledge Environmental Humanities)

Literature and Ecotheology: From Chaos to Cosmos challenges us in a time of climate crisis to find more common ground between the dual projects of ecocriticism and ecotheology. This book argues that in our postsecular age, literature has become an important repository of theological wisdom that can, like formal work in ecotheology, provide the moral grounds for environmental care.However, for any cosmological understanding to be adequate to the challenges before us, it must be responsive to the often-painful contingencies and uncertainties that inhere in the cosmos, something that both ecocriticism and ecotheology have often neglected.After a treatment of the ecocritical and ecotheological questions that pertain to the religious/secular divide, the study then turns to four contemporary American writers-Annie Dillard, Cormac McCarthy, Marilynne Robinson, and David James Duncan-as examples.Each uses the contingency of literary form and its promise of wholeness in order to imagine reasons