About this episode

Susannah Crockford discusses the intersection of religion and climate change, framing the climate emergency as a spiritual crisis influenced by Christian colonialism.

Our ecological system is disturbed, and with it, every other system we’ve built to inhabit it. We do not face inevitable destruction, yet many of us cannot conceive of climate change as anything but the end of the world, an apocalypse with all its biblical trappings. Why? In A Perturbed System : Religion and Climate Change from the End of a World, anthropologist Susannah Crockford argues that we must understand the climate emergency as a spiritual crisis, a result of Christian colonialism that we (religious or not) still struggle to describe without religious language. Climate discourse in the United States and northern Europe, Crockford shows, is framed by the same theological motifs that drove extraction, including ideas about prophecy, mediation, sacrifice, original sin, cult, messiah, and apocalypse. By listening to people on the edge of the crisis, A Perturbed System reveals a world in transition, what happens when worlds end—ecologically, socially, politically, and personally—and how we might live through these endings together. Susannah Crockford is a lecturer at the University of Exeter. She is the author of Ripples of the Universe: Spirituality in Sedona, Arizona, also…

People in this episode

Guest: Susannah Crockford

Topics covered

• climate change
• religion
• spiritual crisis
• Christian colonialism
• apocalypse
• ecological transition

Keywords

• climate emergency
• spiritual crisis
• Christian colonialism
• apocalypse
• ecological systems
• theological motifs

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: University of Exeter, University of Chicago Press

Books & works: A Perturbed System: Religion and Climate Change from the End of a World, Ripples of the Universe: Spirituality in Sedona, Arizona

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