Annual Lectureship in Religion and Literature
Prof. Joshua King
This lecture asks how, why, and to what effect poets have revived and reworked an old tradition in Jewish and Christian worship—affirming creation’s praise of God—to register and contest modernity’s disenchantment and devastation of creation. Considering nineteenth-century poetry alongside poems and liturgical songs from contemporary Christian environmental and climate justice movements, this lecture argues they invite a living sense of participation in creation as a sacred community that is urgently needed amidst our planetary emergency.
Background: Poetry included in Jewish and Christian worship has long portrayed everything from stars to whales as participants in a cosmic liturgy that involves all creation. Examples include the Psalms and ancient and medieval canticles, such as the Benedicite and St. Francis’s well-known Canticle of the Creatures. Regarding other creatures as worshippers comes to seem embarrassing or at best an indulgent pathetic fallacy after modernity has disenchanted creation as “nature” and extracted humans from it, draining the more-than-human world of animate agency and appointing humans (some more than others) to set the conditions for nature’s meaning and manipulation. Even so, to register and contest ecological and human costs of such disenchanted management of nature, poets have revived and reworked the language of creation’s praise. Always vulnerable to escapist romanticism, such recovery can also be inventive and revisionary, challenging speciesism, the modern autonomous self, and extractive global capitalism in ways that can freshly return to anti-imperial roots of the ancient poetic tradition of creation’s worship. This lecture pairs examples past and present, considering nineteenth-century poems by the likes of Christina Rossetti and Gerard Manley Hopkins alongside contemporary poems and liturgical songs in ecumenical Christian environmental and climate justice movements. Such poetic and liturgical experiments invite what ecotheologians, scholars of ecoliturgy, and environmental humanists have variously urged and sought to recover: a living sense of participation in creation as a sacred community, precisely when we and all members of our common, precious home are most endangered.