Faith after the Anthropocene

Abstract

This is the introductory essay to the Special Issue “Faith after the Anthropocene” publishedin Religions 11:4 and 11:5. How does the Earth’s precarious state reveal our own? How does thisvulnerable condition prompt new ways of thinking and being? The essays that are part of thiscollection consider how the transformative thinking demanded by our vulnerability inspires us toreconceive our place in the cosmos, alongside each other and, potentially, before God. Who arewe “after” (the concept of) the Anthropocene? What forms of thought and structures of feelingmight attend us in this state? How might we determine our values and to what do we orient ourhopes? Faith, a conceptual apparatus for engaging the unseen, helps us weigh the implications of thismassive, but in some ways mysterious, force on the lives we lead; faith helps us visualize what itmeans to exist in this new and still emergent reality.