Jeremy Kidwell

Unexpected Encounters with Deep Time

The fractured timespace of the Anthropocene brings distant pasts and futures into the present. Thinking about deep time is challenging: deep time is strange and warps our sense of belonging and our relationships to Earth forces and creatures. The introduction to this special section builds on scholarship in the environmental humanities concerning the ongoing inheritance of biological and geologic processes that stretch back into the deep past as well as the opening up of multiple vistas of the futures. Rather than understanding deep time as an abstract concept, we explore how deep time manifests through places, objects, and practices. Focusing on three modes through which deep time is encountered— enchantment, violence, and haunting—we introduce deep time as an intimate element woven into everyday lives. Deep time stories, we suggest, engage with the productive ways in which deep time reworks questions of narrative, self, and representation. In addressing these dynamics, this introduction and the accompanying articles place current concerns into the larger flows of planetary temporalities, revealing deep time as productive, homely, and wondrous as well as unsettling, uncanny.

Hybrid Encounters in Reconciliation Ecology

Over the past century, environmental scientists have developed a range of conservation approaches. Each of these, from management to restoration has embedded within it certain dualisms which create exclusive spaces or agencies for “human” and “nature.” I begin with a critique of these binaries as they occur in philosopher, Florence R. Kluckhohn’s influential model and in more recent narratives about the “Anthropocene,” and then turn to examine some of the novel features of “reconciliation ecology” as it has recently been deployed in the environmental sciences. Though this model is beginning to see wider use by scientists, it has not yet been explored within a religious framework. Taking up Miroslav Volf’s suggestion that reconciliation involves a “double strategy” I highlight ways that reconciliation can (1) provide a viable model for promoting an “embrace” of the other and (2) better integrate the past history of negative human biotic impacts.

Radical or Realist? An Inquiry into the Social Ethics of John of Chrysostom as a Model for Resourcing the Tradition in Reflection on the Common Good

This conversation about theology and economics can tend to be a strictly contemporary discourse, with scholars often defaulting to a truncated sense of historical context and failing to look backward to pre-modern conceptions of political economy as a tool for contemporary reflection. This is, in my view, a tragedy, as some of the finest theorizing about economics in the ancient world was done, not by a professional class of empirically focused scientists, but by professional philosophers who were often also professional theologians and church leaders. In many cases, patristic reflection on economics and politics offered a tight integration between social ethics, driven by theological reflection and economic analysis. In seeking to share a small sample of this kind of Christian reflection on economics for this volume, I undertake a very specific look at one Patristic thinker in order to demonstrate that we might look back toward the ancient world with hope for creative solutions to what seem intractable problems today.