An (incomplete) Introduction
to
Collapsing with Care: A Field Guide to Meaning-Making as the World Unravels
(A Project of “Conversations at the Edge of Hope: On Climate, Collapse, and Care”)
October 22, 2024 – David R. Weiss
READ FIRST: This is a very long (and important) post: it runs about 22 pages. If you’d rather read it as a pdf, you have TWO options. One is a pdf without active hyperlinks. You can see the full urls, but you can’t click through them. This one is formatted exactly as I set it up in Word. The other is a pdf WITH active hyperlinks. If you open this pdf while connected to the internet, you can click through to essays I mention. This version alters some of my formatting; it’s still very readable, but doesn’t look quite the way I had it formatted in Word. (Apparently when converting a Word doc to a PDF, Word lets you convert either formatting or hyperlinks, but not both. In any case, there is no need to click through to any of the links while you’re reading; they’re provided for reference, but they’re not needed to follow what I’m writing here.
NOTE: This is an “imagined” draft of an introduction to Collapsing with Care: A Field Guide to Meaning-Making as the World Unravels, an as yet “imagined” book. It captures (and expands on) the introductory background about myself and this project that I shared during the initial “Conversations at the Edge of Hope: On Climate, Collapse, and Care” held at Merging Waters UU on October 8, 2024. As such, this piece itself sits on an edge, somewhere between first conversation and final publication. I am sure even this introduction will evolve as the project unfolds. But we need to start somewhere. We begin here.
An (incomplete) Introduction
Who each of us is in any moment of our lives is shaped by far more forces than we are aware of. So, in a very real manner, a complete introduction is beyond me. Moreover, the shaping never stops. Even who I am as I begin this project will change over the course of the writing. Change—patient, unfolding, chaotic, traumatic—is the ceaseless hum of the universe. As is relatedness. We are each our own current of ongoing change, but also—endlessly—interweaving with others.
On account of that constant change, my introduction is necessarily partial, incomplete, unfinished. And on account of that relatedness it remains necessary, essential, foundational to the work I’ll be doing … with you … work we will be doing together.
I am going to take you on a journey into unfamiliar territory: Collapse[1]. It is a world almost as unfamiliar to me. So, really, we enter it together. Companions.
It is a world where both the ecological and societal forces that have made our world today … are torn asunder. Not all at once in a single instantaneous event, but with a slow inexorable force over years, decades, and centuries. But in a geological blink of an eye—far faster than most life forms (and most social forms) can adapt. Indeed, the first frays at the edges began centuries ago or longer, though they went largely unnoticed at the time. But we—those alive today and the next few generations after us—we will experience some of the full screeching tears in that ecological and societal fabric in our lifetime. In our world.
And while Collapse writ large will happen in bits and pieces spread across time and space—it is happening already now. Wildfires. Hurricanes. Floods. Drought. And more. These natural calamities, now made unnaturally hotter, stronger, higher, and longer, are the prelude to a world teetering on Collapse. And in the ecosystems and communities ravaged by them, Collapse has already left its mark. Though it is far from done with us.
An ominous journey, to say the least. Perhaps you’d rather not come along. I’m with you. Except—this isn’t so much a journey we’ll take as it is a journey that will take us. Collapse is coming for us, whether we like it or not. But we can choose how we meet it.[2]
What I’m offering, then, is the opportunity to anticipate and understand collapse so that we can meet it with awareness, resolve, some measure of planning, and an abundance of care.
* * *
Having read even that little bit, you’d be right to ask about who I am, that you should consider joining me on this journey. And that’s what this most incomplete introduction is about. Think of it as something of a brief intellectual-theological autobiography so you understand where I’m coming from. A down payment on trust.
I am not a climate scientist—nor any kind of scientist, to be honest. I’m a theologian. As I’ll explain below, I no longer use “God” language in my writing, but I still regard myself as a “theologian” because in my work, I remain committed to discerning the deepest values and patterns of meaning in human life itself—what theologian Paul Tillich referred to as our Ultimate Concern, the “god-value” by which we orient our lives. For many years I did that type of theology using religious (Christian) language; I now do the same work using human-centered language, still seeking to plumb the depths of what confers meaning and accords awe in our lives.
While climate change (more accurately called climate breakdown) is often—and legitimately!—discussed from the vantage point of science, the root causes of it are interwoven with human values and meaning-making—and the consequences of it will shake our values and our sense of meaning to the core. So, while theologians can’t address every facet of climate breakdown and Collapse, we can offer essential guidance that lies beyond the scope of hard science as humanity seeks to hold onto to cherished values and navigate the challenge of finding patterns of meaning in an unraveling world. That’s my project.
And this is a brief introduction to my background.
I grew up in Trail Creek, a small town adjoining Michigan City, Indiana and just a couple miles from the southernmost shores of Lake Michigan. There was a modest woods right across the street from our home; it seemed a whole forest to me as a child, and I spent long hours over there in all seasons exploring that “wild” world: catching toads and turtles, turning over dead logs eager to see what wriggling things lie underneath, watching tadpoles in the creek and the dragonflies that darted left-right and then down to water to snatch food. For several summers I collected grasshoppers in homemade cages that I furnished with jar-lid watering holes and climbing branches. I watched them for hours, feeding them fresh plant leaves and treating them to the trimmed tips from our ears of sweet corn, which they loved.
But it was closer to the lake itself, in the “singing sands” of the Indiana dunes (usually hiking with my siblings and dad), where I encountered Nature as alive. We sometimes hiked alongside skeletal treetops protruding barely knee high, and I learned how dunes, moving too slowly for our eyes, could swallow, “digest,” and then uncover whole stands of trees over decades. I met Nature as vast and expansive, as mystery and beauty, as peril and power. Nature as worthy of awe.
And although our house was hardly isolated, on moonless nights our front lawn was dark enough to host a show of stars that left me breathless and awestruck as a kid. From woods to dunes to stars I was enchanted with the natural world.
Nonetheless, if I’m honest, despite my genuine childhood curiosity toward the natural world, my real love has probably always been words. I spent as much time in books as outdoors, and for most of my life, from childhood to present, nature has been a beloved backdrop to my more immediate passions of writing, teaching, and doing theology. Today, nature—the entire natural world in crisis—collides with those passions. And so, I find myself offering my words to the world … my world, your world … as it collapses.
About those words. This is how they have been trained and exercised over the years.
Already in high school I tilted my course load toward the humanities, loading up on literature: one of the arts where human experience was distilled into meaning. At Wartburg College, a small Lutheran college in Iowa, I minored in religion and majored in psychology and sociology. Steeped in Lutheranism growing up, I confess that in these years I assumed Christianity uniquely carried (capital T) Truth—and that Lutheranism carried it most faithfully.
Thankfully, my majors in psychology and sociology and a particularly provocative English course in existentialist literature allowed me to recognize that the human hunger for meaning was universal, finding expression in all persons and communities. I would leave college headed toward Lutheran seminary, still committed to Lutheran theology—but now equally committed to the profound insights provided by social science and the humanities. It was a creative tension in the life of my mind, although a confusing one for me vocationally. (That’s a whole other story. Suffice to say there were strong influence in my family and church that hoped to see me become a pastor, while my relentless intellectual curiosity and more humanist leanings made the study of theology intoxicating—and the thought of parish ministry suffocating.)
The sole college course I took that hinted at the perils we face today was an interdisciplinary course, “Futuristics.” We read Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock, which focused more on technology than ecology, but I recall that it sowed in me the first seeds of a critical skepticism about the future—that perhaps there were unforeseen (and undesired!) consequences to our rapidly accelerating “progress.”
After college, I attended Wartburg Seminary for three years, departing with an M.A. (vs. an M.Div.) after successfully parrying all the familial, pastoral, and faculty efforts to convince me to pursue ordination. Aside from the outside pressure to become a pastor, seminary was a rich intellectual experience for me: one that broadened my faith and theology in ways that remain important to me still today. I’ll mention four of them.
In a liturgy class I learned the potential power of ritual (and song) to harness energy and communicate ideas and feelings that lay at the edge of words. In my lived experience in Lutheran and United Church of Christ churches, I have only rarely experienced liturgy that fulfills this promise in worship—though the blame for this might fairly be cast in several directions. (From the written words to the leader, from the congregants to the wider culture, liturgy is never automatically effective. It requires a dance of consent to its creative energy from those involved.) Nonetheless, I am certain that in a collapsing world, ritual and song will be essential aids in preserving and strengthening community, holding space for overwhelming emotions, and nurturing the values at the heart of our lives.
Second, I came to understand Jesus’ message (and, in my mind, the core prophetic thrust of the biblical tradition) as fundamentally concerned with this worldly ethics (centered around justice, mercy, humility, compassion, and love). I became convinced that the real “miracle” of Jesus’ life was that he offered us one embodied example of a life radically opened to and transformed by the power of love … and invited others to follow him there. His “divinity” was the fulness of his humanity. These insights, garnered from biblical studies as well as courses that introduced me to feminist theology and liberation theology, set me early on a path from a more traditional Lutheran theology to a radical-progressive Christianity that emphasized faith as the agency of human meaning and the catalyst for personal-social change in this life.
I put these newfound convictions immediately and passionately to work, joining a seminary advocacy group on anti-apartheid issues because of Wartburg’s close relationship to Lutheran pastors in Namibia. Also, convinced that nuclear weapons posed both an imminent danger and an idolatrous lure, I helped lead a successful effort that resulted in the seminary removing its “Fallout Shelter” signs—patently empty promises in the face of a nuclear holocaust—and replacing them with more colorful signs declaring the seminary a nuclear free zone while still pledging our deepest hospitality and aid in any event of emergency. That drive to embody my own meaning-making in actions that benefit and transform communities continues to shape my life, all the more urgently as we enter Collapse.
Third, outside of my formal coursework, but while in seminary, I first encountered the creation spirituality of Matthew Fox, at the time a “dissident” Catholic theologian, later expelled from his order for views deemed unorthodox. Fox’s work was significant for me in two ways. He offered a view of spirituality that was fully engaged in this world—and a view of a world alive with the sacred and worthy of our full engagement. Rightly or wrongly, the onset of adolescence had dampened my childhood enchantment with nature. I had inherited a faith that regarded the physical world with intrinsic suspicion—the amplification of shame around sexuality that spilled onto the entire material world. Matthew Fox’s creation spirituality was the first to challenge that in words and images that resonated for me.
Fourth, reading Matthew Fox proved a providential “pre-requisite” to a course I took in my final year titled “Theology of the Land.” In retrospect, this was an introduction to what would become eco-theology: reflecting deeply on how we regard the land through our view of God—AND how we regard God through our view of the land. Among the three texts we read, Wendell Berry’s Unsettling of America left the deepest impression on me. Not least because I envied the poetic beauty of his prose, but just as much because in Berry’s prose Nature came alive. Those sand dunes of my youth, the woods across the street, the farm fields that quilt the Midwestern landscape, the great forests, the mountains, the only seemingly barren desserts: each habitat became its own Other, with whom we live in relationship—justly or unjustly. The seeds planted in that class, in 1986, took nearly a decade to germinate—and nearly three decades to mature—but it was in the writings of the poet-farmer Wendell Berry that I was first invited to listen for the holy within the wild places of Earth.
I left seminary in 1986 intentionally un-ordained, but telling myself that my learning, my love of words, and my passion for justice were the perfect set of skills to position me for rewarding work changing the world. You could certainly characterize the nearly forty years since then as a set of variations on seeking to change the world—as activist, writer, teacher, hymnist, etc.—although I just as often experienced those years as a long sojourn in a wilderness. (Its own tale.) But perhaps those years of vocational wanderings, almost entirely outside the security of steady employment, have equipped me to wander as needed with even less security now.
Instead, of finding world-changing work, I spent the next six years in Madison, Wisconsin: making banquet salads in a hotel kitchen, then mailing out educational filmstrips to schools, then managing shipping-receiving-and-inventory for a recycled paper company, and then (please forgive me) running machines that stuffed and stamped (mostly) junk mail. I might call this my second “graduate degree,” this one in humility. I certainly learned a lot in each job I held, not least about the lives—the anxieties and aspirations … and the dignity—of the people I worked with. Most of them with less formal education than me, but all of them brimming with just as much humanity as me.
Those co-workers, along with my extended family, became the audience-in-my-mind (the public!) for whom I did my first writing as public theologian. Initially, that usually meant thinking about God (or Christian theology in general) out loud in my writing. Sometimes in personal letters, but often in letters to the editor of the two newspapers in Madison, Wisconsin, where I tried to set forth my convictions in ways that reflected my progressive faith and its relevance to a variety of contemporary topics.
Alongside my work to earn a living and my letter-writing, I also found an outlet for my passion for peace and justice through volunteering with a national advocacy group based in Madison called Nukewatch. Focused on nuclear disarmament, we addressed issues from nuclear weapons to foreign policy decisions that made for a less just and less safe world, including the natural world. I regularly participated in Nukewatch events and even initiated several projects of my own, including a Christmas campaign against war toys and authoring a street theater performed in downtown Madison, in which the United States was put on trial for multiple (and very real!) violations of international law.
In August 1988 I assisted with press communications when Nukewatch, in concert with several other peace groups, carried out the Missouri Peace Planting: the simultaneous peaceful trespass on ten ICBM missile silos hidden in plain sight in Missouri farm fields. Trespassers received months-long prison sentences for this adventure in public truth-telling. My role was safely at the edges of this event, but my years volunteering with Nukewatch gave me a practical education in strategic planning and creative thinking in pursuit of justice, skills that Collapse will require of all of us.
During those same years, as part of Nukewatch protests, I was twice arrested for nonviolent acts of civil disobedience. (Only twice, and for very minor actions of peaceful trespass—I make no claim to heroics.) Still, imagine explaining in several long letters to your very traditional Lutheran and fairly politically conservative extended family in another state how it was that your (at the time) Christian faith helped create the photo on the front page of a Madison newspaper where you’ve chained yourself to the front doors of a federal building. That’s a challenging opportunity to practice public theology! But it shows—already thirty-plus years ago—that I was pressing my words to carry meaning across chasms toward better understanding.
In 1992, motivated in part by my experiences as an activist-writer and public theologian (although I did not know or use that term at the time), I began a graduate program in Christian Ethics at the University of Notre Dame. My immediate goal was to earn a degree that would allow me to teach college religion for a living, but my real passion was to refine my thinking and strengthen my voice as a writer able to address contemporary issues with conviction and clarity—in the classroom and in the public square.
From the very start grad school challenged me to think more carefully and frame my words more clearly, but it was midway through my studies, in 1995, while preparing for a candidacy exam (that is, doing a year-long independent study) in Christian Theology and the Environment, that the seeds of eco-theology planted back in seminary finally broke ground. I read a couple thousand pages and reflected at length—in silent conversation with some of the leading eco-theologians of the day—on where we humans have presumed to fit ourselves within (or apart from, or above) the wider world—and at what cost to the planet, our fellow creatures, and ourselves. But also, where we might fit more wisely and humbly in theological and/or creation-centered terms. The details of my thinking have evolved and refined themselves since then, but many of the central themes have remained consistent.
Besides that one independent study, which was singularly impactful, I did coursework or other independent studies (candidacy exams) in the Hebrew Prophets, the Historical Jesus, Christian Nonviolence, and African American, Liberation, and Feminist Theology all of which found fertile ground in my intellect and imagination. All of which still indelibly shape my thinking and as my thinking turns toward Collapse.
The following spring (1996), I developed and taught my first college course at Notre Dame, “Contemporary Christian Thinking on the Environment.” I wanted to introduce students to the mounting ecological perils of the day and to suggest that (unbeknown to most of them) Christian theology had an important contribution to make in reshaping from the inside out our relationship with creation. Because I was teaching mostly first- and second-year undergraduate students, with majors across all disciplines, I needed to present the very heady ideas from the previous year’s graduate level readings in using readings, lectures, assignments, and activities that engaged them as fully as possible. This passion to be accessible and engaging still drives my writing and speaking even though I’m no longer in a classroom.
That fall (still 1996), now synthesizing my own insights from study and teaching, I delivered my first academic paper at the Wisconsin Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies: “Beyond Ecological Security: Intimacy and Risk. Imago Dei as a Theological Resource for a More Creative Encounter with the Earth.” [3] Although neither the phrase “climate change” nor “global warming” appeared in that paper, I was addressing the ecological crisis and trying to articulate progressive Christian theological insights that could help chart a more harmonious relationship with Earth in contrast to the longstanding aspiration (at least in Western cultures) to presume dominance over it.
I argued that, especially as we consider the ministry of Jesus, but really across the entire arc of the biblical narrative, we find God’s willingness to be intimate and to take risks. Therefore, we ought to regard these same qualities as central to what it means to be in the image of God as Christians have used the phrase imago Dei from one of the Genesis creation stories. And that by developing these qualities more intentionally, we would set ourselves in a healthier—and more holy—relationship with creation.
I don’t believe the Judeo-Christian tradition has anything like a monopoly (not even an inside track!) on ecological wisdom. At the time I understood myself to be lifting up the wisdom within “my” tradition because it was the one I knew best. Today, while I continue to regard intimacy and risk as core qualities that can guide us in our relationship with the Earth and our fellow creatures, I no longer root them in Christian language. They are simply healthy human postures worth cultivating to ground a wise vulnerability in our relationship with people, planet, and all that is in between.
There is something of an adrenaline rush to writing academic prose with all the stops pulled out—and all the heady jargon pulled in. But there was a different rush that had prompted my letters to the editor and to my extended family a decade earlier. And teaching undergraduates helped rekindle and refine my voice as a public theologian. I have always found a uniquely rewarding joy in being the bridge between that heady jargon and the average interested person.
In February 1997 that “joy” drove me to write a teary-eyed essay that I submitted to a Notre Dame monthly literary magazine. I wrote in response to an anonymously penned prose-poem in which a gay senior lamented that he would graduate in five months, having spent all four years at Notre Dame entirely “in the closet.” He had not spoken this sacred truth about himself to anyone on campus: no student, coach, teacher, counselor—no one. His piece was titled, “Living in Fear,” and he described that fear with eloquent anguish. My rejoinder to him, titled, “Words offered at the end of the day to an unknown friend living in fear” was published in the next issue. In my piece, literally writing through my weeping, I ransacked all my learning, both academic and personal, and leveraged all my wordcraft to offer him (and others) something that might feel like hope.
That unexpectedly powerful coalescence of empathy, learning, and words was a watershed moment in my own vocational understanding, and it has marked my writing ever since.
A couple months later I wrote an “audition” column—and was accepted as a bi-weekly student newspaper columnist for the Notre Dame Observer for the 1997-98 school year. Every other week I wrote a 600-800-word op-ed essay commenting on current events and campus happenings. Several of my columns were picked up by local newspapers, including the Indianapolis Star. My voice as a public theologian was getting stronger—and getting noticed.
In spring 1998 (my last year at Notre Dame), because of the course I’d taught two years earlier and because my newspaper columns had made me a “known” voice on campus, I was invited to be the keynote speaker for the University’s Earth Day celebration. In that talk, “Consuming the Earth in Search of Our Worth,” the phrase “global warming” appeared in my writing for the first time. I declared that our unbridled patterns of consumption were largely to blame for the threat we posed, both to the earth beneath our feet and to the atmosphere above our heads.
I further argued that the “driving force” behind the ecological crisis was a crisis of meaning. That our consumption—all out of proportion with our actual need—was an ill-fated attempt to assert our worth over against the seeming indifference of the world around us. Our primal existential insecurity, mostly denied, was driving us to consume the planet to death because we’d been convinced—largely under the tutelage of modern advertising—that if anything bestows meaning and worth, stuff does. That we were, in effect, desperately trying to fill a hole inside ourselves with material stuff rather than with a richer sense of personal-social meaning.
Over against this false option, I made the theological claim that, as Christians, we do indeed consume our worth—but we do so at the altar in the bread and wine, where we receive the gift of unconditional acceptance and affirmation. And that this is a gift of meaning with the depth and power to break the cycle of addiction to material consumption. It was solid progressive Christian eco-theology.
Today I would say our intrinsic worth is cosmically given (gifted to us) and relationally grounded—and accessible through the wise exercise of intimacy and risk. Different religious traditions can echo this truth in their own respective beliefs, as I did in Christian imagery on that Earth Day. But the crisis we face in Collapse is larger than any single religious tradition, and today I am seeking words and images that are larger as well.
After that talk in 1998, I went largely silent on ecological issues for seventeen-and-a-half years, until December 2015.
During my time at Notre Dame, I was also developing a strong theological voice around a faith-based welcome to LGBTQ+ persons. When I joined the religion faculty of Luther College for four years, in my first teaching position from 1998-2002, that question of welcome was the driving issue in the ELCA and on Luther’s campus. As a result, for those four years—and for the next thirteen years as an adjunct instructor in religion/theology at several colleges up in the Twin Cities—my vocational path took me deeply into public theology seeking to create welcoming and affirming space in faith communities, Lutheran and beyond.
For seventeen years, alongside my other teaching, I taught classes, wrote essays, preached sermons, led workshops, wrote hymns and plays, and gave public lectures about the wideness of God’s welcome. In general—alongside the multitude of odd jobs I held to help make ends meet—I made working as a public theologian on behalf of LGBTQ+ affirmation and welcome my own personal cottage industry. During this time, I strengthened my voice as a progressive Christian theologian. My work was specifically harnessing Christian language and imagery as the basis of this welcome: my goal was to help my fellow Christians become comfortable, explicit, and articulate in naming WHY they welcomed and affirmed LGBTQ+ persons.
Thus, the driving force in my teaching and writing was not simply to be clear about my ideas and convictions, but to lend that clarity to others. Because owning that WHY matters. It makes for a welcome that is resilient under pressure. And, as we confront Collapse, being able to say WHY we engage it with care will matter, too.
That work around LGBTQ+ welcome remains close to my heart.
But something has changed.
During those many years, while using my voice on behalf of welcome, I also recycled—religiously. I went largely vegetarian (technically, pescatarian; I still occasionally eat responsibly-sourced fish). I shopped at co-ops as often as possible and chose to buy only cage-free eggs. I began to participate in community-supported-agriculture, buying a share in a CSA that delivered fresh produce from farm right to my neighborhood each week over the summer. In a whole variety of ways, I had cultivated a closer, more responsible relationship with Earth, but it wasn’t the focus of my work as a public theologian.
What changed? I suppose, on some very real level, the weather did. Not simply the evidence for potential climate change, but the mounting evidence of impending climate change … now already upon us. I’m not scientist myself, but as an educated and interested layperson, I was following the best science available to me, the type found in UN reports covered by the leading newspapers and more thoughtful journals—and that science was alarming to say the least.
But something else changed, too. I started to grow old. I know, by some measures I’m far from old yet at 64. I do hope I have plenty of years left to me. And age is all perspective. But this also brings perspective: I’m a grandpa now—nine times over. And while feeling old may be subjective, needing all my fingers and one thumb to count up grandkids is a pretty objective sign that I’m on the far side of ripe, however you wish to measure it. And what having grandchildren has done for me, is not so much make me contemplate my own mortality as it has pressed me to imagine theirs. A future hardly as brimming with promise as I once imagined it would be.
That’s why, over the summer of 2015, with eight grandchildren in my life and the ninth one coming in 2016, I began to sense an inward restlessness to revisit my earlier work around eco-theology, to put my gifts as a progressive Christian theologian into summoning the church to work on behalf of a hurting planet. I’ll admit now I had no idea how hurting the planet was. I brought my gifts forward with an embarrassing abundance of naiveté. I imagined I would join other eco-theologians, activists, and scientists in helping to create the awareness and resolve—even if just in the nick of time—to forestall climate disaster.
I began in December 2015 with an essay, “Climate Change—Claiming this Crisis as Ours.” In it I was honest about sensing the long odds ahead (not accurate, mind you, just honest), but I was also optimistic about the church seizing this moment and choosing to embody its better angels. It is a modest yet masterful essay. Near the end I wrote, “I’m looking for a community willing to say out loud with me, from our star-seeded blood to our water-crossed brows, this is our crisis to face, our moment to be church, our season to journey together in holy conversation with one another.”
If I’m honest, I’m still looking. The odds were far longer than I figured at the time. The willingness of the church to hear hard truth far less than I hoped. Nonetheless, I read and reflected and wrote with focused fury. My central question at the time was this: What does “Christian Spirituality in a Time of Climate Change” look like? That question guided my writing for the next several years.
I was invited to offer a series of three lectures for Grace Lutheran Church in Eau Claire, Wisconsin in the fall of 2016. In fact, it was that invitation, extended in the fall of 2015, that precipitated my December 2015 essay as a sort of self-introduction to that congregation. In the spring I offered five mid-week Lenten reflections for them, each time using one of the assigned Sunday bible texts as a touch-point for talking about climate.
I spent much of the spring and summer of 2016 steeping myself in climate-related reading—both the lay-accessible science and the eco-theology reflecting on the science. It was a lot to take in, a lot to “catch up on” after having my mind turned in another direction for so long. One rather innocent moment captures the visceral wake-up call I experienced during those months.
Alongside my climate-specific reading, I was also following the climate headlines in the newspaper with extra interest. One Sunday the headline announced that 2015 had been the hottest year on record since 1880. As the article explained, it was almost certainly the hottest year since long before 1880, but 1880 is the first year we had sufficient records from around the world to calculate an average global temperature for each year.
The news story included a chart showing the warmest sixteen years over that 136-year span. They were listed in order of heat, so at first glance they looked like a fairly random set of years. Until I looked closer. After scanning them up and down several times, I realized that, as of 2015, out of the last 136 years—ALL SIXTEEN of the hottest ones had occurred during my youngest daughter’s 19-year lifetime. She’s added a year to that collection every year since, so that by the end of 2023, all twenty-four of the hottest years on record fell in her 27-year lifetime.
Two things struck me that day. First, that Susanna is growing up on an altogether different planet than I did. And second, that my love for her compels me to figure out what I can do that might help her find her way on this unfamiliar planet that is her only home. This is just as true, of course, for my other children and grandchildren. It was simply the case that how those hottest years fit within Susanna’s years hit me with visceral, sobering, alarming force.
That summer (2016) I was invited by Buffalo United Methodist Church in Buffalo, Minnesota, to preach on climate. In my June sermon “Intended for intimacy: The promise of a vulnerable God in a time of climate change,” I introduced some of the themes that I would expand on further in the fall lectures. I announced that we were living in an apocalyptic moment (not a once-for-all end of the world, but an ending of one world and the beginning of another very different one—the one Susanna would grow up in). I drew on themes from my work almost twenty years earlier: imago Dei (as the foundation of Christian anthropology—how we understand what it means to be human); compassion and vulnerability as core characteristics of God; and, thus, characteristics that ought to lead us to a deeper, transformative intimacy with creation. Then I added a stark new theme: that this intimacy would ask of us … anguish. Profound anguish.
This was my first public message delivered after that gut-wrenching wake-up call. I had barely scratched the surface of reckoning the stakes of the climate crisis. I had not yet even considered the real possibility of Collapse. But I was uncompromisingly honest in my conclusion:
I’m as anxious for hope as the next person, but right now I’m convinced that anguish is our most faithful response to climate change. And I can’t fast forward to hope just because I’d rather be there. To be imago Dei in this moment of apocalypse is to embrace vulnerability. To truly feel the anguish of ecosystems irreparably damaged and of species lost to extinction because of human activity. Besides reckoning the harm we have done to creation, that anguish may also be the only response authentic enough that it allows us to grieve for creation as our own kin. To grieve at a depth that begins to restore the intimacy for which we have always been intended.
That emphasis on anguish-grief-lament as the foundational beginning place of any response to the climate crisis has remained central for me ever since. It is a near-mystical claim. To this day, even as I now work from a post-Christian frame of reference, I am convinced that the scientific fact of relatedness as the ground of reality implies the moral truth of deep kinship across the whole of the natural world. And that as beings uniquely capable of complex understanding and self-awareness, we open ourselves to the depth of who we are when we dare to feel-with the whole of this wondrous-now-deeply-wounded world.
This anguish is the portal through which we must pass (at length! maybe without end) in order to undergo the inward transformation that will sustain and refine the outward transformations that must also occur. This insight is also at the heart of Joanna Macy’s work in The Spiral of Active Hope and The Work that Reconnects, but I did not encounter her work until several years later. This core conviction about the role of anguish in meeting the eco-crisis was also mine from the start. But it was rarely a welcomed feature of my work.
I titled the fall 2016 lecture series “At Home on Earth: Christian Spirituality in a Time of Climate Change. Toward Becoming an Apocalyptic, Evangelical, Prophetic Church.” And I developed each of those subtitle themes in one of the three lectures: (1) apocalyptic: anguish; (2) evangelical: hope; (3) prophetic: resistance.
I went back and forth with the planning team for the series about how to “promote” the opening talk. There was a lot of reluctance about using either “anguish” or “lament” in promotional materials. The feeling was that no one would be excited to attend a lecture with a “down” tone. So, it was promoted under the theme of “Honesty” about the ecological crisis. The planning team was fine with me talking about lament, so long as it wasn’t featured on the posters. So, in the message itself (once the people were present and in their seats), I did invoke anguish as the necessary entry point for the church.
The second lecture asked how we speak of hope in the midst of unfolding apocalypse and necessary anguish. In answering, I reviewed the many biblical tales in which God’s chosen vulnerability is to keep people company in tumult. In other words, the slim, but in my mind decisive “good news” that the church could authentically offer, was to declare the presence of God even as worlds teetered from one to the next. The third lecture used the notion of “prophetic resistance” to call the church to more actively call out and challenge those forces despoiling the planet—and also to model a community committed to living more intimately with the Earth.
In that last lecture I introduced another theme that has stayed with me: the deep embrace of finitude. We are not mere “pilgrims” passing through Earth on our way to our final and somehow more real “heavenly home.” Rather, Earth itself, in its finitude—which is also our finitude—is our home. Thus, “At Home on Earth” is the first phrase in the title and the concluding claim in the lectures. This inward reorientation—really a fundamental shift in both cosmology and anthropology—remains at the center of my work. It reflects my conviction that the human predicament—the existential crisis to which we all must respond—is the challenge of embracing finitude as a goodness of nature rather than a flaw; the challenge of living with grace and compassion as creatures who—like every other Earthling (flora, fauna, and fungi)—are both graced and destined to die.
Over the next two years I presented versions my “At Home on Earth” talk at five or six other churches while I continued my reading and reflection, tweaking the talk accordingly. But I was also driving a route several days a week for a nonprofit that delivered groceries to senior citizens. (Good work and necessary to pay the bills.) In 2017 I taught my last college class at Hamline University, and in 2018 (spilling over into 2019) I led the adjunct union in bargaining hard and long for a second contract with the university. I kept busy. And too often distracted from this most important work.
Although I loved teaching college and had managed to work well as a public theologian supporting welcome for LGBTQ+ persons alongside my adjunct teaching, the low pay and increasing unpredictability of adjunct assignments eventually forced me to pick up side jobs to supplement my income. By the time I turned my focus on climate, my time in the classroom was sparse. My progressive theological perspective has cost me teaching slots at Augsburg when the department chair rotated to a more conservative member of the department. My LGBTQ+ advocacy created conflict with the administration at St. Kate’s that led to the end of my teaching there. With Hamline as my sole remaining source of (now very) part-time teaching, I became involved in—and then the faculty leader of—a successful drive to unionize the adjunct faculty. And that, in a nutshell, is how my dream of “seeking to change the world” played out in higher ed. By the end of 2017 I found myself emotionally and vocationally exhausted.
In response, in 2018, I participated in two extended graduate seminars aiming to recenter my vocation now that “college religion instructor” was no longer a viable identity. As a result of those seminars, I made the daring decision to claim “public theologian” as my primary vocation. I say “daring” because despite my experience, passion, and gifts, this was a new “position” that existed only in my imagination—and came without guarantee of pay or benefits. It was the choice to do what I felt called to do … and trust that the doing would prove it possible. It was the choice to “clear my desk” of other distractions and value my work for its importance irrespective of the income it generated.
I set up a Patreon account (an online site that allows people to pledge financial support to my work) and began writing in earnest under the heading “Community-Supported Public Theology.” All my writing since the beginning of 2019 has been Patreon-funded.
It’s tempting to portray this venture as a visionary and courageous—and there is some of that at play—but it has more often felt precarious and impractical. Most of us live in a world dictated daily by dollar signs. They tally our expenses and our income—and they presume (culturally and psychologically) to determine our worth. It has been easier to assert the value of my work than to feel it somedays. There are reasons for this other than the very modest income that Patreon provides. Climate crisis and now Collapse are hardly upbeat topics; so, there is that. But I think the steepest challenge has been the relative isolation of my work.
Appreciation and collegiality can’t pay the bills, but they can confirm the value of work beyond dollar signs. The conversations that undergird this project are one way to keep myself—and my sense of worth—well-nurtured as I do this work.
Beginning in December 2018 (Advent in the Christian liturgical year) and running through November 2019, I committed myself to writing one essay each week under the broad theme, “The Gospel in Transition: Facing Climate Change, Finding Hope, and the Alchemy of Christian Community.” By “Gospel” I meant life-changing “good news”; by “Transition” I meant the Transition Town Movement, a grassroots movement fostering a transition away from life organized around fossil fuel; and by “Alchemy” I meant the many ways Christian communities might offer/embody good news by bringing their own particular gifts to the critical work of transition.
For fifty-two weeks I wrote an essay each week (1000-1500 words). Some of them did indeed consider the resonances between Christian community and Transition Town principles. Others reflected on current news stories, the liturgical season, or happenings in my own life, always as part of a larger conversation around faith and climate. Aside from a few times where I explored a theme over several weeks in a row, these were “free-standing” weekly pieces that exercised my ability to write about climate and faith in plain but eloquent English from a multitude of starting points.
That year I also encountered the work of Joanna Macy through her book Active Hope, which made a lasting impression on me. After reading the book myself, I led two small groups through the book, co-authored a reader’s guide to it, and created a “Sacred Circle” liturgy around the book’s central themes. I wound up reading several more books and articles by her and was even able to take a live webinar with her in 2022 (she was 92 at the time). Her work has helped confirm, clarify, and deepen many of my own early convictions.
In 2020 I wrote a few pieces on climate themes, such as “JPMorgan: Banking on an Apocalypse,” but before long my climate writing (and my life) got turned sideways, first by the pandemic and then by the murder of George Floyd. My writing also turned in these directions and I spent most of the year working on themes related to the pandemic, racial justice, and police abolition. These were important and timely topics, and I addressed them the same accessible and provocative public theology that is my gift.
Although I wrote less about climate in 2020, I continued learning, and my thinking continued to evolve. In particular, I began to actively wrestle with the very real possibility of Collapse: the chance that the ecological damage done by human activity had been so great—and had accumulated so much inertia—that Earth systems themselves would inevitably buckle, collapsing societal systems as well, leaving human “civilization” at risk … or worse. NOT easy stuff to process! I did much of it in silence, unsure of who would be receptive and to discussing my ruminations regarding the demise of our world.
From the fall of 2020 to the summer of 2021, I was in deep ferment. Shaken to my core by what I was reading (and some presentations and videos I was watching online). Jem Bendell’s “Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy” was at center. Bendell was a rising academic star in sustainability studies, but at some point, he grew suspicious of his own work. “Deep Adaptation,” written in 2018 and revised in 2020, argues that when you connect all the dots of climate damage (and all the forces that obscure those connections and hinder or outright undercut our response) we are simply past the point of healing the planet—at least of healing the planet to an extent that could allow industrial civilization to continue. Hence, his call for “deep adaptation”: a radical acceptance that we will not/cannot stave off climate-driven collapse and that therefore we ought to begin taking steps NOW to brace for impact, so to speak.
Although Bendell’s essay (downloaded over a million times) was met with derision and criticism by some, his 2020 revision addresses those critiques and overall strengthens his case that we are headed (in the near term, likely in just decades) toward abrupt and widescale disruptions in both ecological and social systems in response to the climate crisis.
Still, his concluding message, far from being an admission of defeat or an invitation to an individualist or tribalist “prepper” mentality, is instead a call to pursue creative, constructive, compassionate means of “deep adaptation.” He proposed “four R’s,” paired with four questions, to guide this process. Resilience: What values and behaviors do you want to keep in our culture and your daily life? Relinquishment: What values and behaviors are you ready to let go of? Restoration: What are the values and behaviors that you used to have in your culture or another culture that you’d like to adopt? And Reconciliation: With whom do you want to make peace while you can?
[Bendell’s paper spawned an entire movement, known as Deep Adaptation, which uses his thesis as a framework for practical and philosophical-spiritual conversation as well as grounding collaborative practice among a growing decentralized community that seeks to anchor humanity in hands-on compassion in the face of approaching ecological collapse. Some religious leaders who have embraced Deep Adaptation have added a fifth R to Bendell’s set: Reverence: In what ways and in what spaces can we recognize and reclaim Reverence as a primary and trustworthy source of guidance? (As framed by Project Adapt.)]
There were many other participants in this conversation in my head as well. I’ll mention only a few here. Michael Dowd, who billed himself as a “Post-Doom” Theologian, curated a website with an entire library of video presentations in which he explained the science of Collapse as well as a multitude of video conversations he recorded with others exploring how we might respond to Collapse with humanity. Articles and podcasts by Nate Hagens and Richard Heinberg deepened my understanding of the implications of coming to the end of the age of oil—and added to my skepticism toward the desperate promise of a green future.
Stephen Jenkinson’s work, featured in “Griefwalker”; Paul Levy’s use of wetiko (an indigenous concept of pathological behavior that cannibalizes the communal good) as a metaphor for our present civilizational pathology; and Sheldon Solomon’s work on our collective fear of death, all offered important insight as I worked past the hard science to make sense of the internal human and social-cultural dynamics driving us toward Collapse.
Finally, Michael Shaw’s personal odyssey in the film, “Living in the Time of Dying,” and Emmanuel Cappelin’s similar journey in the film, “Once You Know,” (which also features the work of “collapsologist” Pablo Servinge, author of How Everything Can Fall Apart) offered profound moments of affirmation and companionship as my inner world tilted.
Altogether, these months of deep inner tumult and reflection left me seriously interrogating the course of my work and wondering how and when to make a “public” course-correction. Remember, I had started, back in 2016 with a call to lament. How do you get more serious than that?! While I continue to believe that opening ourselves to grief and anguish is the pathway forward, I had reached the conclusion by summer 2021 that all my words thus far had understated things.
In my writing since then I have addressed collapse with increasing openness, believing that until we reckon accurately our predicament, we cannot begin to chart a way forward—where “forward” might indeed mean something like learning to practice hospice for a future that will not be, while playing midwife to a future we never imagined.
In August 2021, I wrote the “Dark Hope” series, a set of eight posts (with two others closely related), in which I laid out the case for Collapse from both a hard science and social science perspective—and then asked what it would mean for us to take this seriously. At the time “us” was still “the church”; Collapse was coming for everyone, of course, but I still saw myself addressing fellow Christians with renewed urgency and an all the more sobering message. This series, written in a 10-day frenzy, holds a lot of content worth refining and expanding on.
In February 2022 I presented “ON EDGE: God-Talk on the Cusp of Ecological Collapse,” in response to an invitation to share my work with the Twin Cities Process and Faith group, a network of theologians and pastors interested in process/relational theology. Given this audience, my central question in this presentation was to ask how Collapse presses “God-talk” (theology) to the edge. How does the prospect of Collapse reshape the way we imagine and speak about God? And how we choose to be church? I concluded by reviewing a handful of resources (including Joanna Macy’ Active Hope, the Transition Movement, and Deep Adaptation) that might assist us in these urgent reimagining tasks. With a 3-page annotated bibliography, “ON EDGE” is the closest thing to a formal academic presentation of my work in eco-theology since that initial conference presentation in graduate school 26 years earlier.
My next two presentations, both for local churches, fell shortly before and shortly after Easter. In “Between Easter and Earth Day: What Dare We Hope?” and “Leaning into the Wind: Resurrection Faith and the Scale of the Ecological Crisis,” I began the delicate work of presenting Collapse—and the spiritual challenges posed by it—to unsuspecting lay audiences. By “unsuspecting” I simply mean that these talks were part of regular adult ed programming at these churches. So those in attendance were a broad sweep of the congregation, not simply those concerned about the climate.
This raises one of the defining challenges of this work: everyone needs to grapple with Collapse. None of our lives will be immune to its impact. But the capacity to wrestle with such hard truths varies widely from one congregation to the next and one person to the next. So, it is a skill (which I am still learning!) to deliver a message that can deftly adapt its manner and tone to those present. NOT by watering things down (we can’t afford that), but by meeting people where they are—with care that is as uncompromising as the truth.
I spent the remaining months of 2022 accompanying my mom on the final leg of her journey through Alzheimer’s—and then grieving her death. It was a necessary emotional interlude with family and deep feelings. But it also proved transformative in my work.
My mother’s death was a powerful reminder of my own mortality. And not simply that I, too, will die—but that the time remaining to me is precious, worthy of my most careful consideration. No surprise, there. But, like that chart of temperatures that aligned so poignantly with Susanna’s youthful years, that most careful consideration of my time following my mom’s death brought home an in-my-gut awareness that of all the urgent words I was writing to the church about climate and Collapse, those least likely to be moved by them … were my own children. For whom church held no place in their lives.
This is a tale told elsewhere, and there are multiple layers to it (there are more forces at play than just my mother and my children), but suffice to say my mom’s death became the spark that prompted yet another twist in my journey. The following spring (2023) after much more inner wrestling, I announced that I was “Giving Up On Church for my Children.” That is, I was choosing to step back from the progressive Christian tradition (in which I had fashioned a creative and mostly workable if sometimes awkward home) because the looming likelihood … the already unfolding reality of Collapse had now become so certain for me, that I needed to find a way to write about it that could reach my children. As I wrote in that piece, “If the language I know best does not reach those I love most dearly, how can I not set off in search of other words?”
The core themes in my thinking remain the same, but moving forward, I’ve chosen to anchor my work in language that is fundamentally HUMAN rather than in words or imagery specific to one faith tradition. This is most particularly in the hope that it makes my work more accessible and inviting to my children, though I know that there are many others (both beyond and within religious communities) for whom my human-centered words will hold worth. Thus, I now write for both the most personal and the widest possible audience.
Because I recognize the need for community support as I do this work, I’ve made two very intentional choices. I’ve joined a Unitarian Universalist congregation. The community helps sustain the whole of my spirit, not simply my work on climate and Collapse. It is becoming a source of friends, a weekly opportunity to practice reverence, gratitude, fellowship, grief, and joy. All things that help steady myself as I press to imagine how we might navigate the unimaginable with grace and humanity.
The second choice has been to begin hosting monthly conversations around my writing. These have been opportunities for me to present pieces of my work and then engage in lively informal conversation around it. I relish invitations to make more formal presentations, but it’s also been extremely helpful to have the ongoing engagement and support of a smaller group who clearly appreciate my work-in-progress and are invested in seeing it move forward.
I launched these in September 2023 under the heading, “Conversations while Writing into the Whirlwind.” For the first year we met at a small church in my neighborhood. They were happy to host the fledgling group, which was convenient for me and some of my St. Paul friends, but much less so for the UU congregation I’d recently joined (which, at the time, was in between buildings and renting space to gather on Sunday mornings). I’m extraordinarily grateful to Zion Lutheran for their year of gracious hospitality. Thankfully, in September 2024 Merging Waters Unitarian Universalist began sharing building space with the United Church of Christ in New Brighton, so Merging Waters is now pleased to host these conversations as part of its commitment to bear witness and offer presence around the issues that shape our lives today.
Three shorter essays from the first year (2023) of these conversations represent initial efforts to present central themes in my thinking. They are the type of work I want to refine and expanded upon in earnest in the coming year or two. “Grief-stricken—and Graced” begins an important conversation about the necessary place of grief in meeting collapse. “The Roots of Our Ruin: We Fell Apart” offers insights into how we got here; understanding what “went wrong” in the human psyche is a critical step in asking whether it is even possible for things to be “made right” at this late date—and what “making things right” in our psyche even means if collapse in now inevitable. “HEATED: The Climate of Politics in a Collapsing World,” while focused on the 2024 election, is a reflection on larger socio-political dynamics that will have ongoing (and unsettling) relevance long past this election.
Two book reviews, written early in 2024, highlight insights from two collapse-themed books. “Interrupting the Anthropocene” reviews Roy Scranton’s little 2015 book, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, a provocative reflection on the social forces—especially within digital social media—that entangle us in destructive behavior. The other piece, “Ahmed Afzaal: Teaching at Twilight,” reviews Afzaal’s book, which presents collapse to those teaching in higher ed and argues that their vocation as teachers calls them to reshape their teaching (and their collegiality) in light of collapse. Afzaal introduces some key research around hemispheric brain-science and its significance for understanding how we got here and for informing what we choose to do next, both of which deserve a hearing beyond higher ed.
Finally, my two most recent public presentations offer glimpses of my present overarching perspective. Both presentations are limited in some ways by their respective contexts, but they show my determination to bring collapse into the forefront of my public work. “Easter and Creation Care for a Wounded Planet” (April 2024; a 45-minute adult forum presentation) uses the image of Thomas’ need to touch Jesus’ wounds after Easter as an entry point for talking honestly about Earth’s wounds—and collapse. It is a superb if poignant and sobering piece. It’s also my only Christian-framed writing or speaking since my March 2023 “Giving up on Church” essay. And likely my last.
The Easter talk (an invitation I’d committed to nearly a year earlier) proved immensely difficult to prepare. I spent decades honing my voice as a progressive Christian public theologian; and from 2016-2022 I used that voice with fervor and clarity around climate. It was no small choice for me to “break” with the Christian tradition, but it was the most honest decision I could make with respect to my own evolving theology, the urgency of climate crisis, and my love for my children. Hence, despite the “success” of the Easter talk—it was exceptionally well-received by a roomful of 40-plus persons, even with its deep gravity—I do not think I would step back into a “Christian voice” again. It was far more psychically disorienting than I anticipated. I have no regrets in choosing to find new language beyond Christianity. And if I speak in a Christian setting again, it will be using my post-Christian humanist voice.
An example of this voice is “Imperiled Together: Toward a Planetary Pluralism via Mindful Interdependence, Authentic Curiosity, and Courageous Love,” a service reflection (like a sermon) for Merging Waters Unitarian Universalist in May 2024. This piece is shorter—it needed to be just about twenty minutes—and framed by its congregational context. The May theme for UU’s across the nation was pluralism, and Merging Waters’ three core values as a faith community are mindful interdependence, authentic curiosity, and courageous love, which is why I use those concepts as reference points.
Taken together, the substance of “Easter and Creation Care” (where I have more time to explain collapse) and “Imperiled Together,” where I focus more immediately on our response, provide a useful overview to my current perspective.
* * *
My goal in offering this long introduction to my background is two-fold. First, I hope I’ve persuaded you that my background in theology and critical thinking (considering ideas and issues carefully and from multiple perspectives) is solid. From my education to my classroom teaching and public writing, I’ve spent forty years learning, teaching, thinking, and writing about how the human search for meaning intersects with the challenging issues of our lives. That extensive background doesn’t automatically make me “right,” but hopefully it leads you to regard me as a worthy conversation partner.
Second, by setting this introduction to my thinking within the broad strokes and sometimes more personal details of my life, I hope you recognize an echo of authenticity in my work. I do eco-theology as an Earthling, one member among a diverse community of Earth creatures. I investigate and reflect on the devastating damage done to this planet by extractive and exploitive practices as someone whose life is thoroughly entangled in the systems that do this damage. And I contemplate Collapse as a husband, father, grandfather, and friend to countless persons whose lives, like my own, are bound to a planet that is unraveling even as our lives unfold on this fragile home. None of this is merely “academic” to me. It is profoundly personal.
Which brings us at last to this next season of my work. Launched in September 2024 at Merging Waters UU, I view “Conversations at the Edge of Hope: On Climate, Collapse, and Care” as an exercise in mutuality. I want these conversations to accompany and assist me as I consolidate, expand, and refine my work in order to make it available to others. That work—born of long years of learning and teaching and alongside equally long years of living and loving—is seeking after words, ideas, images, and practices that will allow us … altogether … to meet the tumult that will arrive in waves over the coming years (and is even now as we speak) … with meaning and conviction. My goal is to produce “A Field Guide to Meaning-Making as the World Unravels.”
Let me offer some first thoughts about what I mean by this.
There are many persons better equipped than me to write about the science of Collapse, the technology that may cushion Collapse, or the creation of alternative social structures to help navigate Collapse. But I am well-equipped to write about the inward aspects of Collapse. So, I’m committed to focus on “Collapsing with Care,” offering something of a “Field Guide to Meaning-Making as the World Unravels.”
That is, I hope to help us (a) understand the inward (psychological/spiritual) forces of Collapse that helped make it now inevitable; (b) grasp the inward attitudes and appetites that must shift if we are to meet Collapse with a chance at surviving it; and (c) chart the inward dispositions and skills that will be essential to us if we hope to preserve our humanity as Collapse overtakes us.
There will, of course, be an abundance of external challenges to meet as Collapse unfolds. And we’ll need new knowledge and practical skills to navigate a most unfamiliar planet. AND—it will be so tempting to want to put all our energy into doing things. This distracts us from the feelings of panic and grief that Collapse brings. But it’s my firm belief that unless we also do the inner work that sustains our capacity to care for each other and prepares us for meaning-making as the world unravels, we won’t be fully ready or able to make the changes in our outward behaviors or take up the challenging tasks that will be needed to make life livable. The infrastructure of our future life lies inward. And I believe I can help us in crafting that infrastructure.
There are, admittedly, others besides me engaged in versions of this very project. And yet I am driven to use my energy here, and I believe I have something distinctive to say … and a distinctive way of saying it.
I read and listen and reflect with a poet’s perspective. Yes, I do, in fact, occasionally write in verse, but that’s not what I mean here. By poet’s perspective I mean I have a rare gift to perceive unexpected connections and relationships between images and ideas that often produce rich insight for me—and for others. Whether across disparate disciplines or between disparate voices in related disciplines, I bring notions together such that they “spark.” I believe my writing around “Collapsing with Care” will do the same in worthwhile ways.
Additionally, I write with empathetic eloquence. I don’t simply craft words that read well together. Because I listen well in between writing, I have a knack for crafting the words my readers have been seeking to name their own intuitions. In the two decades I spent focused on writing about welcoming LGBTQ persons in faith communities, I heard—countless times—from my readers, that I had gifted them with words to hold the truth of the convictions that had been rumbling in their hearts. So, I believe that my writing around Collapse—writing that by its very subject is unsettling—can also hold an anticipatory empathy for my readers.
I should be clear, neither poetic perspective nor empathetic eloquence are postures I “adopt” for their usefulness. They reflect how I naturally encounter the world. As such, they represent distinctive gifts I bring to this most important, most existential conversation.
Lastly, I am undertaking this project for the sake of those I love. Of course, I hope my work benefits many, but my motivation has its deepest roots in my own children and grandchildren, in other family and friends, and in the communities to which I belong. As much as I am driven by the gifts I carry, I am equally driven by the names I hold in my heart. Convinced that Collapse is already dawning on planet Earth, with its repercussions set to ripple across the physical and social landscapes of our lives, how can I not invest my best energy, my most creative thinking, my finest words, on behalf of those I love? And so, this is what I will do.
I trust that my understanding will grow and deepen as I work on this. I expect some of the ideas I begin with will be recast along the way. All the more reason … to begin. Let me start by briefly explaining the choice of words in my (tentative) title, Collapsing with Care: A Field Guide to Meaning-Making as the World Unravels.
Collapsing: Simply put, from this very first word, there will be no sugar-coating of tomorrow. We are collapsing and we will be collapsing for the rest of our lives. I can offer no more quiet assent to “hope.” Collapse is our future. (Obviously, “hope” is a loaded word, and I’ll have more to say about it along the way. But when hope is used to avoid facing the hard truth of Collapse, it becomes shorthand for denial, and we can’t afford that any longer.)
… with Care: Whatever “hope” we want to claim now has to do with our character and compassion as we collapse. Cultivating a capacity to act with care toward ourselves, one another, our fellow creatures, and the planet itself, is the foundation of hope. In the midst of Collapse, hope can no longer be the belief that “things will get better.” It must become the conviction that compassion—the concrete practice of care—is worthwhile no matter what.
A Field Guide: While I imagine this as a book that people will read from start to finish, I also hope it becomes something of a prized reference that they refer to again and again; hence, a “field guide.” Further, we often think of a Field Guide as a book that helps orient us to unfamiliar terrain; that’s precisely what I hope to do here: provide an orientation to the inner terrain of our hearts and minds as we move into Collapse … and as Collapse engulfs us, framing all our lives.
… to Meaning-Making: For over 40 years, since my introduction to the work of James Fowler on Faith Development and to existentialist literature and philosophy during my last year of college, I’ve been persuaded that our capacity for (our hunger for) meaning-making is the quality that confers humanity on us. Our sense—even when desperate and doubtful—that meaning can be made is what enables hope or faith. And living with hope or faith is what anchors our humanity—our capacity for care. This “Field Guide” aims to point us in the direction of meaning-making when the terrain beneath our feet—and beneath our souls—becomes entirely unsteady. To serve as a resource for processing collapse in ways that hold faith, nurture love, and practice care.
… as the World: Collapse is all-inclusive. It will claim large swaths and multiple dimensions of the natural world. It will strain and eventually shatter the formal institutions and political structures as well as the informal cultural assumptions that govern our social world. And it will shake to the core the roots of our inner worlds: religious beliefs, moral convictions, and basic humanity. Collapse is coming for just about everything—and everyone.
… Unravels: Collapse is not a singular event; it is a process that will be long, with predicable turns and unpredictable twists. Some aspects will be precipitous; others will unfold more slowly (across generations—if we’re lucky). Right now, we are “caught” in liminal time—unable to prevent Collapse, yet able in some crucial ways to brace and temper our outer and inner worlds for what is to come. Perhaps even to fashion the inward and outward skills that will assist us in preserving and transforming humanity for life in a Collapsing world.
All of that said, there are also a handful of things I should be clear that I’m NOT doing. These include:
I am not planning to make any specific predictions about thresholds or tipping points in the natural world. I’m not a climate scientist or any kind of Earth scientist. Early on I will review the science I find most compelling regarding Collapse but chronicling and anticipating the details of Collapse in our physical world is work best done by others. I’ll be reading along.
Likewise, I am not planning to make any specific predictions about societal/political breakdowns. I’m not a political or social scientist. While I do foresee real chaos on this horizon—as an unavoidable consequence of the physical upheavals ahead and the way they’ll stoke our fears and threaten our values—I’m not in a position to forecast the specifics.
I am not planning to offer any financial or real estate advice. I see people post questions in Facebook groups: What should I do with my retirement savings? When will the banks go under? Should I look to purchase property where I can grow my own food? These are real questions (or they will become real questions at some point), but I’m not equipped to address them. If I do well what I am able to do, you’ll be in a more grounded place inwardly as you wrestle with such outward questions.
I am not planning to offer any homemaking skills. It goes without saying that Collapse will carry away many of the conveniences we now take for granted. So, yes, reclaiming many lost or lapsed homemaking skills will be extremely beneficial (indeed, maybe lifesaving). But my focus is on the inner work that will allow us to reclaim such skills from a place of gratitude and joy rather than resignation and fear. My gut belief is that while the inner work often seems intangible and almost impractical, shifting our posture to welcome the radical simplicity that is coming our way may be the single most practical thing we can do.
That said, I hope my work sparks others to begin teaching some of these homemaking skills even as I’m working on this project. We’ll need to be Collapse-Engaged on multiple fronts, and I’ll be glad to do some of this learning from others.
Finally, I am not planning to propose or develop any alternative community models. Many of our current models (shaped/misshaped by capitalism) have proven destructive of our outer and inner worlds, so fashioning new ways of organizing our common life will be essential. It simply isn’t my particular expertise or focus, and I think it’s important for me to do what I can do, to do THAT very well—and to know those limits and not exceed them. There are others already doing this critical work, and I would rather support their efforts than do an incompetent job of mirroring them.
There is always more that could be said, but that’s plenty for an incomplete introduction.
I am not sure whether this Field Guide will ultimately become a print book or an online resource; that will become clear with time. It could easily become a never-ending project, but I believe it’s more important to bring it to completion in time to be useful to as many people as possible. I won’t offer a timetable; but, as I said, I’m driven, so I won’t be dawdling.
I will incorporate some of my best writing from the past few years, but I will write much of it fresh. This will be a living, organic project, unfolding in real time right now—and in conversation with others, particularly those who join me in “Conversations at the Edge of Hope: On Climate, Collapse, and Care.” This project will surely bear the imprint of these conversations.
I cannot stop collapse. But I can help chart a path into and through collapse with grace and vision. Collapsing with Care: A Field Guide to Meaning-Making as the World Unravels—it feels like sobering work, and yet, I am convinced that in a collapsing world it will also be a field guide to finding joy.
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I welcome your support as I work on this project. You’ll find a description of how my Patreon account works in this August 2023 blog post: “I am . . . Writing into the Whirlwind” (https://davidrweiss.com/2023/08/11/i-am-writing-into-the-whirlwind/). The post includes a link to my Patreon site, which is also right here: https://www.patreon.com/fullfrontalfaith.
I use Patreon as a site to receive and track financial support, but I don’t post my writing there. My writing goes on my WordPress blog (https://davidrweiss.com/). I encourage you to subscribe to my blog so you can follow my work as it unfolds. Right on my homepage, you’ll see an option to “FOLLOW BLOG VIA EMAIL” at the right side. Just enter your email and hit “Follow.” You’ll receive a confirmation email; once you confirm your interest, you’ll get an email notification each time I post.
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David Weiss is a theologian, writer, poet and hymnist, “writing into the whirlwind” of contemporary challenges, joys, and sorrows around climate crisis, sexuality, justice, peace, and family. Reach him at drw59mn@gmail.com. Read more at www.davidrweiss.com where he blogs under the theme, “Full Frontal Faith: Erring on the Edge of Honest.” Support him in Writing into the Whirlwind at www.patreon.com/fullfrontalfaith.
Bibliography of Selected Essays by David Weiss (in chronological order)
1997
“Words offered at the end of the day to an unknown friend living in fear” https://davidrweiss.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Spirituality-Coming-Out-Words-Offered.pdf
1998
“Consuming the Earth in Search of Our Worth”
2015
“Climate Change—Claiming this Crisis as Ours”
2016
Five mid-week Lenten reflections
“Intended for intimacy: The promise of a vulnerable God in a time of climate change”
“At Home on Earth: Christian Spirituality in a Time of Climate Change. Toward Becoming an Apocalyptic, Evangelical, Prophetic Church”
2018-2019
“The Gospel in Transition: Facing Climate Change, Finding Hope, and the Alchemy of Christian Community”
Sacred Circle Liturgy
2020
“JPMorgan: Banking on an Apocalypse”
2022
“ON EDGE: God-Talk on the Cusp of Ecological Collapse”
“Between Easter and Earth Day: What Dare We Hope?”
(Slides only) https://davidrweiss.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/2022.04.20-Earth-Day-and-Easter.pdf
“Leaning into the Wind: Resurrection Faith and the Scale of the Ecological Crisis”
(Text) https://davidrweiss.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Leaning-into-the-Wind.pdf
(Slides) https://davidrweiss.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Leaning-into-the-Wind-IMAGES.pdf
2023
The “other forces” at play in my leaving church …
“Giving Up On Church for my Children”
“Grief-stricken—and Graced”
“The Roots of Our Ruin: We Fell Apart”
2024
“HEATED: The Climate of Politics in a Collapsing World”
“Interrupting the Anthropocene”
“Ahmed Afzaal: Teaching at Twilight”
“Easter and Creation Care for a Wounded Planet”
Images #1: https://davidrweiss.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Incarnation-Handout-p1.pdf
Images #2: https://davidrweiss.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Incarnation-Handout-p2.pdf
“Imperiled Together: Toward a Planetary Pluralism via Mindful Interdependence, Authentic Curiosity, and Courageous Love”
“Conversations at the Edge of Hope: On Climate, Collapse, and Care”
Other Referenced Links
Project Adapt – (https://projectadapt.earth/becoming-adaptive/)
Jem Bendell: “Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy”
Emmanuel Cappelin film “Once You Know”
Review: https://www.resilience.org/stories/2022-05-24/once-you-know-documentary-film-review/
Watch: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/onceyouknowvod
Michael Dowd website – (https://postdoom.com/)
Stephen Jenkinson documentary “Griefwalker” – (https://www.nfb.ca/film/griefwalker/)
Joanna Macy website – (https://www.joannamacy.net/)
Michael Shaw film “Living in the Time of Dying” – (https://www.livinginthetimeofdying.com/about)
Sheldon Solomon – The Sun interview
(https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/25916-this-mortal-coil)
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[1] I’ve chosen to capitalize Collapse when referring to the singular-dynamic event-process that is the subject of my writing. Things collapse all the time. But Collapse as I mean it is different. Although it will play out over decades, generations, and ultimately centuries, Collapse is an integrated (deeply interconnected) process of disintegration on a planetary scale. The planet itself is NOT collapsing, but many of the systems on which multiple life networks—including our own—depend IS collapsing. That merits an upper-case Collapse.
[2] In Man’s Search for Meaning, reflecting on the harrowing experience of life in Nazi death camps, Viktor Frankl wrote, “Everything can be taken from a person but one thing: the last of human freedoms: to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
[3] I am embedding hyperlinks for those reading online—and providing a list of the URL links at the end for those reading on paper. I don’t expect anyone to read all these pieces (which even so represent only a fraction of my writing). But I am providing them for anyone who wants to look at a particular piece.
