Ecological Revelation and the Crisis of Narrative

Date of Award

Spring 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Religious Studies

First Advisor

Jennings, Willie

Abstract

Revelation is an often unspoken premise of humanistic reflection on ecological crisis. Journalists, climate writers, and scholars in disciplines from ecocriticism to ecofeminist theology frequently suggest that anthropocentric narratives are breaking down along with the earth’s climate and ecosystems. These claims generally feature a comforting symmetry: the ecological destruction authorized by those narratives has unveiled the fundamental entanglement of all things. Scholars like Anna Tsing and Donna Haraway suggest that stories based on this insight are more “true”—i.e., reflective of the “best” sciences—and thus more politically and ethically promising. Across the chapters of this dissertation, I explicate these visions of what I call “ecological revelation,” many of which place high hopes on stories to motivate political action and to heal earthly relations. I show that ecological revelation, and its characteristic emphasis on narrative, has unexpected ties to and resonances with Christian theologies of revelation. Essayist and novelist Amitav Ghosh’s writings on the unthinkability of the nonhuman in climate change provide a foundational case study of ecological revelation, and establish its relationship to public and scholarly contestations over the eco-political value of narrative. Next, I turn to the works of H. Richard Niebuhr, Wolfhart Pannenberg, and Rowan Williams, three Christian theologians from the past century who reworked revelation as a narrative category. I explore how these theologies of revelation have contributed to contemporary conceptualizations of crisis and storytelling that undergird the common diagnosis of ecological crisis as a “crisis of story.” This diagnosis is reflected in the entanglement narratives of Tsing and Haraway, whose visions of ecological revelation ultimately present ecological crisis as an opportunity: if things are bad, at least they are finally bad enough that we can get on with more truly ecological living. I show that the temporality of ecological revelation is eschatological, drawing on the works of ecofeminist process theologian Catherine Keller to name how pervasive concerns about hope and despair repeat what she calls the apocalypse pattern. In its most aspirational articulations, ecological revelation represents an attempt to manage expectations, to soften disappointment by extolling an ever-renewing surfeit of possibilities. By analyzing the theological patterns and errors at the heart of ecological revelation, my dissertation clarifies the implications—and ultimately, constraints—of the wager that ecological crisis illuminates its own solutions.

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